Matt Yglesias

Carbon Pricing Would Help With This

Grist has, alongside its environmental policy news and commentary, a running feature called “Ask Umbra” in which people ask for advice on ecologically responsible consumption. The answer almost invariably turns out to be “this hinges on an impossibly complicated set of considerations.” For example, is it better to buy frozen vegetables or steamed ones:

Grade A frozen foods are harvested when ripe and quickly taken to the freezing plant, where they are (even more quickly) flash frozen at extremely low temperatures. The modern industrial freezing process retains almost all the original nutritional value of the food (according to nutrition guru Marion Nestle’s helpful book What to Eat). Good to go on the nutrition angle. But it’s important to have an efficient freezer. One study using 1970s data found that the longer frozen foods sit in the freezer, i.e., are using energy in storage, the more they fall behind canned goods in the efficiency smackdown.

The canned goods are a bit less nutritious, but a study that looked closely at this issue found the differences between frozen and canned carrots to be insignificant. Carrots in syrup, or whatever they might put carrots in, would of course fall in to the category of dessert or a processed food, and cannot be favorably compared to fresh. As you know, the ecological issue with canned carrots is the steel can itself, which has high embodied energy costs. If a study assumes the recycling of the steel can, then canned vegetables can compete favorably with frozen vegetables on the sustainability index.

From a political perspective, this sort of thing underscores the need for collective action in the form of public policy that will put a price on greenhouse gas pollution. To realistically assess the total environmental impact of the choice between frozen carrots and canned carrots, you’d also want to know something about the land-use impact of your decisions, the transportation of the goods, the energy costs of keeping frozen food frozen in the supermarket, etc. You can’t really do this sort of thing through back-of-the-envelop calculations.

Epistemology With James Inhofe

Pew reports that the right is having a great deal of success in trying to mislead people about climate change. The header Pew put on the graphic notes that the decline is “across party lines.” But you should look at the magnitudes—the Republican line has fallen way further, and from a lower base, than the Democratic line. This is probably a rationalizing voter example where increased salience of the issue is bringing more Republicans into line with the beliefs espoused by their party’s leaders.

Meanwhile, James Inhofe says:

Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll aside from the precipitous drop in the number of Independents who believe global warming is a problem, is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade. And this explains quite clearly why Democrats don’t want the public to know about it.

These are curious uses of the terms “know” and “learn” which are generally reserved for instances in which people form true beliefs. On the specific issue of cap and trade, the evidence has always been that the term “cap and trade” is barely in circulation outside the Beltway. Public support for clean energy legislation under different descriptions tends to be high. You can get poll results as good at 72 percent in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act under one favorable description.

Carbon Pricing is the Best Path to Realistic Technological Solutions for Climate Change

A non-artificial tree

Will Wilkinson and Ryan Avent further bat around the geo-engineering subject, with Wilkinson in comments mentioning super-carbon-eating trees as the kind of technological fix to which he thinks environmentalists are giving short shrift. For basically Popperian reasons I don’t think it makes sense for political pundits to spend a lot of time debating the relative difficulty of developing different hypothetical future technologies. Instead, I would just say that the best way to find out whether human ingenuity is better at keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a sustainable level by developing artificial trees or by developing better windmills is to . . . implement a binding emissions reduction scheme that puts a price on CO2 emissions.

This isn’t, in other words, an either/or choice. If you had a cap-and-trade system in place, that would put a range of modalities—better efficiency, more clean energy production, more trees & algae, and carbon-scrubbing machines—in a competitive framework. One assumes we’d be looking at some kind of mix. But defining the correct mix in advance seems very hard. Hence the appeal of a basically market-esque mechanism that creates incentives to work on these various ideas without unduly prejudging the appropriate level of investment in speculative technology.

What I think is remarkable is the extent to which people on the right, in their zeal to avoid a market mechanism that the business establishment happens to hate, have a tendency to talk up what instead amounts to a kind of Five Year Plan approach. Instead of regulating carbon, let’s just direct scientists of invent miracle trees! Let’s turn the sky red! The greenhouse gas problem is one of the largest political crises the liberal/democratic/capitalist order has ever faced, but unlike something like Hitler the basic shape of the problem is something we’ve seen and dealt with before. The whole “sometimes there are negative externalities and you need to charge people for them” thing is in basic textbooks. Maybe the result of such a scheme will be a technological miracle, or maybe not but the shape of the policy environment that will let us find out isn’t mysterious.

On Geoengineering

Albedos of different roof types

I largely agree with what Ryan Avent is saying here—the appeal of geoengineering solutions to global warming is largely illusory. That controlling carbon emissions is hard is obvious because there are real proposals on the table to do so, leading to real pushback, real multilateral negotiations, real compromises, real problems, etc. Relative to that, a hypothetical geoengineering scheme can be made to look pretty good. But you have to compare like to like. On international coordination, for example, it’s actually a lot easier for me to imagine China agreeing to binding emissions targets than to imagine China agreeing to let the United States conduct a doomsday weather control machine or us agreeing to sit idly by while China launches a satellite capable of blotting out the sun.

On a non-insane level, the idea of trying to build machines that suck CO2 out of the air and then somehow store it is pretty clearly worth researching. That said, trees already do this quite well and our tree-planting technology is fine. Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees? It seems to me there are lots of places in America where trees could be growing but aren’t.

Which comes around to the overarching point that the term “geoengineering” often obscures more than it reveals. There’s a world of difference between offering financial incentives for people to build high-albedo roofs and building a miles-long hose to pump sulfur into the upper atmosphere. Do I get to be a bold contrarian thinker if I propose that surface parking lots should have more tree cover? Somehow it seems I don’t. But it makes much more sense to focus on practical deployments of proven technology (trees, white paint) than on trying to dream up the most fantastical possible solution.

Obama Administration Looking to Curb Fossil Fuel Giveaways

Oil shale (National Archives photo)

One of the odder things about the tendency of politicians who like to espouse free market principles to oppose efforts to reduce American dependence on dirty energy sources is that the way the status quo works is that fossil fuel producers are actually pretty heavily subsidized. And, naturally, it got worse while George W. Bush was in office. Jim Tankersley and Josh Meyer report for the LA Times:

The Obama Interior Department is reviewing a decision made by the Bush administration in its final days that attempted to lock in lucrative royalty rates and favorable regulations for oil companies holding leases for oil-shale development on public lands.

The decision, which came in the form of amendments to existing leases, drew little public notice at the end of the Bush administration in January. But since then, congressional watchdogs, environmental groups and state officials in Colorado, where most of the leases are located, have denounced the amendments as a massive giveaway to the oil industry.

Any time you talk about oil shale it’s also a reminder that though messages about “energy independence” tend to poll well, it can be a risky gambit for clean energy advocates to rely too heavily on talking points that can also support very dirty undertakings.

Climate Security Arguments Making Some Gains

I have slightly mixed feelings about some of the national security arguments that I’ve heard advanced about the need to prevent catastrophic climate change (I have my own national security arguments that I like better). But you evaluate a political strategy based on how well it actually works, not on how you feel about it personally. And via Brad Plumer, Darren Samuelson suggests that these arguments played a big role in persuading Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that it made sense for him to start wading into the issue.

That’s a big win. And Operation Free, the veterans-oriented coalition group that’s been set up to push precisely this argument, is really just getting up and running this month.

Planning in the Climate Bill

Elana Schor has a helpful roundup of a recent Brookings event on improving federal support for Metropolitan Planning Organizations and, even more important, improving the extent to which the federal relationship with MPOs actually supports good planning. This is an important element of dealing with the climate issue. The built environment evolves slowly over time so it’s difficult to get large short-term emissions reductions through better land use, but by the same token it’s absolutely essential to meeting long-term targets in an economically viable way.

Michael McKeever, executive director of the SACOG, and Peter McLaughlin, a commissioner of Minnesota’s Hennepin County, agreed that the upcoming congressional climate change bill is essential to achieving land use reform.

If the climate bill “does some fairly simple things and requires … high quality [MPO planning] to be done as a pre-condition of getting federal funds,” local development can become a more transparent and rational process, McKeever said.

Legislators, recognizing this, included language to that effect in the original Waxman-Markey bill. But it wound up getting stripped out. Now it’s back in the Kerry-Boxer draft, but the U.S. Senate is generally less friendly than the House to sound urban planning and land use policy so one should be nervous that it will be removed again. However, with these kind of relatively low-profile issues things like preference intensity make a great deal of difference. If Senators get word that their offices are being contacted by people who are interested in something as obscure as MPO planning, that would get noticed. Of course as a DC resident I’m not allowed to be represented in the governing bodies of the United States of America so I can’t contact anyone.

A Terrible Argument Against Congestion Pricing

Via Ryan Avent, David Owen says that congestion pricing would be bad for the environment because traffic jams inspire people to take transit instead of driving.

This is, in my view, a very silly line of argument. It’s probably true that you could construct a model of a situation in which congestion pricing increases the net quantity of driving. But if that situation exists, and you want to change it, then there are lots of good policy options available. You could use the revenue from congestion pricing to finance more attractive transit options. Or you could take advantage of the reduce congestion to start taking lanes away from private automobiles and building bike and bus lanes. You could do all kinds of things.

The main point I would make is that the issue of whether or not you should congestion-price roadways is more-or-less at right angles with the question of how much your public infrastructure should promote driving versus cycling or transit or walking or anything else. The point of congestion-pricing is that the most efficient way to manage the scarce resource of space on crowded streets during peak hours is via a congestion price. That’s true no matter how much or how little driving you’re hoping to see. If you want people to drive less, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and invest in transit and bike infrastructure. If you want people to drive more, the thing to do is to build narrower roads and be stingy on transportation alternatives. But either way if you want to avoid productivity-killing traffic jams you ought to charge people for driving at peak hours.

Green Conservatism

Connie Hedegaard (photo by Kate Sheppard)

Kate Sheppard was on the same trip to Denmark as I was, and wrote up this post about our conversation with Connie Hedegaard, Folketing member for the Conservative People’s Party and Minister for Climate and Energy in the current Liberal-CPP coalition government:

“It’s at the core of conservatism to take care of the environment, to protect nature, to use resources responsibly,” said Hedegaard. “I can think of nothing that’s more conservative than that.”

Her priority, she said, is that their policies be vehicles for economic growth. The export of clean tech increased 19 percent last year, triple what it was ten years ago. Just recently it passed pork as the country’s leading export product.

“I have tried to turn this into a growth agenda. It is not an anti-growth agenda,” she said. “Often back in the ’70s for the left, socialists and liberals, it was an anti-growth agenda. In a world where we’re going to become 9 billion people by the middle of this century, we must have growth. The challenge is to make this growth more green, to make it sustainable.”

This is basically a Teddy Roosevelt kind of view that from time to time has been espoused by John McCain here in the United States. Starting in the waning days of the Presidential campaign, and continuing for most of the Obama administration, this strain of green conservatism seems to have largely vanished. It recently got a bit of a boost, however, in the form of a joint op-ed by John Kerry and Lindsay Graham. Still, one strains to come up with an example of a right-of-center American politician whose level of commitment to the climate change issue would be recognizable by a Hedegaard or an Angela Merkel or a Nicholas Sarkozy. In part that reflects interest-group politics—the United States is a significant producer of fossil fuels in a way that only Norway is in Europe. But in large part I do think it reflects a kind of failure of intellect and imagination that American politicians have occasionally flirted with transcending, usually only to return to orthodoxy soon enough.

As Long As You’re Going to Be in Scandinavia…

I have no idea if this influenced the Nobel Committee’s decision-making, but it’s worth noting that one thing I’ve heard a lot about in Europe is disquiet over Barack Obama’s failure to commit to personally attending the COP15 conference on climate change in December. There’s a lot of sentiment that the president putting his personal credibility on the line could be an important factor.

The conference is being held in Copenhagen and it starts on December 7 but runs for a couple of weeks. Interestingly enough, the Nobel Prize is going to be handed out in Oslo on December 10. In other words, in the middle of the conference. And Oslo is pretty close to Copenhagen. And Obama will be in Oslo to accept the award. Under the circumstances, it will be hard for the White House to come up with a good reason why it’s impossible for Obama to pop by Copenhagen.

When Life Gives You Excrement, Make Fuel?

Via Ezra Klein, The New Scientist observes that “A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.”

People tend not to understand this very well because the tendency is to use the term “carbon dioxide” as a shorthand for “greenhouse gasses.” But though CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas, it’s far from the most potent. And livestock create huge amounts of methane both from their farts (yes, really, this is a real problem) and from the decomposition of their manure. The good news, as the good people at the Danish Biogass Association were eager to explain to me yesterday, is that there’s a way to deal with the manure side of this. Methane, in addition to being terrible for the environment when released directly into the air, is also usable as fuel (”natural gas”) and when used as fuel it’s relatively clean-burning compared to coal or oil. What they do at biogas plants is basically gather up a huge stinking pile of shit which is submitted to anaerobic digestion. This leaves you with, on the one hand, some digested manure that can be used as an effective and non-emissions-producing fertilizer and on the other hand some methane gas you can use to heat homes or generate electricity.

The biogas itself involves some CO2 emissions, so this isn’t a perfectly green technology. But making the biogas is much cleaner than not making the biogas if we assume that the quantity of animal excrement produced is independent of the existence of the biogas facilities. In other words, if the demand for meat is determining the quantity of cow and pig shit, then biogas plants count as very clean. They sharply reduce the quantity of methane put into the air, and can substitute for other dirtier fuels like coal or oil. If biogas were to actually become such big business that people started raising pigs specifically for the purpose of turning their shit into home heating fuel, then that wouldn’t work ecologically at all.

Currently, though, biogas requires substantial subsidy (in the form of a feed-in tariff) to be viable. So the smart green move is to subsidize biogas production enough to clean up the excrement we have, but not so much as to encourage the creation of additional livestock. In principle, it would probably make sense to have some kind of tax on meat that could be used to raise revenue to defray the cost of biogas subsidies.

Chamber Defections

I largely agree with Josh Marshall’s take on the recent defections from the US Chamber of Commerce:

It’s still only a handful, of course. But it’s an interesting illustration of the different dynamics of the global warming issue than say health care or other regulatory policy issues or labor relations — particularly for companies in the energy field and those involved in mass consumer marketing.

It’s not hard for instance to understand why a company like Nike, which markets overwhelmingly to a younger demographic and to some degree is in the business of marketing cool, would not like to be associated with anti-climate change science extremism. Similar things could be said about Apple, which markets to generally wealthier, more educated and I suspect — though I don’t know this specifically — generally more progressive people.

There’s simply mass awareness and politicization on this issue in a way there’s not about most high stakes political questions. I also wonder whether some companies may not be sensitive to the impact on their reputation on an international trade, those doing a substantial amount of international trade. But the mass politicization and company’s sensitivity to domestic brand damage strikes me as the key takeaway for now.

But I do think it’s worth taking this further. The fundamental problem the Chamber of Commerce is going to have on this is that they’re really really wrong. Not like how they’re morally wrong about, say, labor rights or workplace safety rules. They’re analytically mistaken about the interests of the United States business community. If we take action to avert ecological catastrophe, economic growth will still happen. Capitalism will march on. Big companies will be big, and people will earn lots of money managing them. Yes, the present-day owners of coal companies or manufacturers specifically wedded to unusually energy-intensive processes will be in trouble. But “business” in a broad and general sense will keep on keeping on. People will still want gadgets and furniture, will shop at stores, will buy and sell, and generally keep being customers for business.

The real risk is being run by doing nothing. It’s doing nothing that might end the party, and lead to various kinds of nightmare scenarios. And over time, more and more firms are going to see that they have no particular stake in underpricing pollution. One maybe of the Chamber board is a guy from Anheuser-Busch. A serious climate bill’s not going to put him out of business. Nor, to just pick board affiliated companies whose lines of business I recognize, is it going to put State Farm Insurance or IBM or AT&T or Pfizer or Accenture out of business. But the executives at those companies and their kids and their customers are all going to face all the problems caused by untrammeled climate change. And why, genuinely, should a pharmaceutical company or a telecom company be fighting to stop people from stopping an ecological disaster? It genuinely doesn’t make sense.

The Case Against Pandas

Giant Panda (wikimedia)

Englishman tries to earn the ire of panda-lovers everywhere:

Conservationists should “pull the plug” on giant pandas and let them die out, according to BBC presenter and naturalist Chris Packham.

“Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham told Radio Times magazine.

The 48-year-old believes that money spent on conserving the panda would be better invested in other animals as the species is not strong enough to survive alone.

I think that’s probably true in some kind of narrow sense. And by the same token, one might argue that it’s wrong to expend funds on restoration of architectural landmarks when the funds might be better spent improving infrastructure in poor countries. But there isn’t actually a lump sum of charitability in the universe and not hard to understand why it’s easier to raise funds for preservation of cute animals than non-cute animals. The question is whether panda-related endeavors generate a net surplus or a net deficit of funds for non-panda conservation activities. My understanding is that it’s a net positive, that programs for “flagship” famous animals help subsidize work on lesser-known species.

Still, on an individual basis I think the critique holds up. I own some stuffed pandas, I like to visit the pandas in the zoo, I used to have a panda-based Twitter icon, but personally I try to donate money to more high priority causes.

In Defense of Bag Fees

Atrios comes out against bag fees for air travel.

I have to say I’m not really very sympathetic to this sentiment, or with the current Southwest Airlines ad campaign slamming bag fees. If you figure an airline is going to believe it can acquire a given amount of revenue per passenger from a given route, the bag fee doesn’t actually alter this level, it simply redistributes it from those traveling with no checked bags to those traveling with multiple bags. Nobody is made worse off on average by this. But at the margin bag fees do encourage people to pack less stuff which reduces the weight of the plane and thus reduced fuel consumption and carbon emissions. I wouldn’t want to argue that bag fees are the cornerstone of the new green economy, but it strikes me as a basic illustration of the point that a lot of customary social practices—from the absence of bag fees to poorly insulated office buildings—are ecologically destructive precisely because they’re economically wasteful. There’s some tension between environmental goals and growth goals, but also some elements of parallelism where in both cases it’s better to develop technologies and business practices that let us our capital and resources more efficiently

About that EPA Regulatory Authority

Lisa Jackson

Ted suggests that I might want to start taking my cues from Katherine Weymouth and offer some cheerier stories:

Also, Matt, I think *your* readers might appreciate some cheerier stories. My suggestions:

“Relax: The EPA has Got This!”

“Getting Around the U.S. Senate: Unitary Executive Theory for Progressives”

Heart-warming pictures of Bo. Also.

This seems like as good a time as mention to mention that yesterday Dave Roberts wrote up a good primer on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act to try to tackle climate change. The bottom line:

But no one should be under any illusions. The NSR/PSD/BACT approach is grossly suboptimal for the job that needs doing. It might have the intended effect—killing coal plants—but there’s potential for unintended effects as well, including substantial political blowback.

The key thing, I think, is that it’s hard to see this being politically sustainable. Given the right circumstances, this can be a feature rather than a bug. If political conditions are such that congress doesn’t want to take about climate change, deploying a little EPA regulatory authority will help focus minds and get people focused on the issue again. Alternatively, if political conditions are such that congress is close to enacting a climate change bill you could see deploying a little EPA regulatory authority pushing it over the edge. But if the issue is that the climate fight has just been waged and lost decisively in congress, then it’s hard for me to see how EPA regulation really offers a viable alternative since the political blowback would likely be intense.

The Value of Time

Things like congestion pricing are a hard sell politically, in large part because the idea is so unfamiliar that people get naturally skeptical it will actually benefit them, but the fact of the matter is that everyone hates being stuck in traffic. And as Elana Schor points out, IBM’s Commuter Pain Index survey indicates that people are willing to put their money where their mouth is:

Schor says this means we should reframe the conversation around gas taxes, “When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.”

Very possibly. What’s more this suggests that congestion pricing could pretty substantially improve quality of life in a lot of metropolitan areas. If you had a city in which a $10 congestion charge could shave 15 minutes off commutes, the vast majority of people would consider themselves better off. A minority of people wouldn’t consider that a good deal (and they’d presumably be heavily represented among the group of people whose unwillingness to drive into the congestion zone during peak times would produce the reduction in congestion) but a large number of them ought to be able to appreciate the reduced taxes or higher levels of public services that the charge could finance.

Attention Span

Kevin Grandia, Dave Roberts, and Brad Johnson (my photo available under cc license)

I’m sitting here at a climate change panel and one theme in a lot of folks’ presentations is something I’ve heard at pretty much every climate panel I’ve attended in the past two years—people complaining that the progressive community isn’t sufficiently interested in their issue. And, yeah, climate change is really important! But is there any issue community that doesn’t feel this way? It seems to me that health care gets about as much coverage as a substantive policy issue possibly could be and then after that everyone else is just starved for attention.

I mean, how much do I read about tax policy? Or housing? On some of my pet interests in transportation and land use, you pretty much only here about these things as a sub-set of the climate change issue. And of course that’s an important aspect of transportation and land use policy, but there’s more to it than that.

At any rate, people don’t necessarily focus very much on this, but one of the fundamental facts of the modern world is that technology progresses and the stock of human culture grows, but we don’t add any more time to the day. Attention is, in many ways, the scarcest resource of all. This is why people don’t cook as much as Michael Pollan thinks they should, people don’t read as much as they used to, and people don’t pay as much attention to climate change as they should.

Why Organic?

(cc photo by jdickert(

Ezra Klein and Tom Philpot kick around the issue of whether there’s any real evidence to suggest that eating organic food is healthier. I’m not an expert on this, but my understanding of this lines up with Ezra’s in reaching the conclusion that there isn’t really any compelling evidence here.

And I think it’s unquestionable that the strongest case you’ll find for organic is an environmental case rather than a person health one. Having less chemicals sloshing around in the water would very much be a good thing. But viewed from that perspective the dichotomy between organic and “not organic” doesn’t make a ton of sense. Achieving a 20 percent across-the-board reduction in the use of harmful chemicals would do more good than establishing a 10 percent market share for chemical-free products. This just becomes one of a million ways in which it’s exceedingly hard to make the world a better place through individuals consumer preferences. “Organic” works as a marketing tool because it’s nice and clear, albeit arbitrary. Nothing gets marketed as “slightly more organic than it was last week,” but small, cumulative changes are normally how the world becomes a better place. Ultimately to get that, you need better overall environmental regulation and not a system that depends on consumers being able to pick up on big, obvious clues.

Friday Toxic Chemicals Blogging

Yesterday I mentioned the mounting evidence that high levels of phthalates and other chemicals are responsible for a growing wave of poor reproductive health. I should have also linked to this more updated Nick Kristof column on the subject from a week ago. Meanwhile, Science Progress sums up some new research in Pediatrics which studied mothers and children in New York City exposed to various levels of air pollution and concluded that toxins are impairing kids’ IQs.

Conservatives will tell you, no doubt, that solving any of these problems will strangle the economy. The reality, however, is that the cost of this kind of damage to public health is actually extremely high.

Dude, Where’s My Sperm?

I’ve been freaking myself out over the past 24 hours by reading Reece Rushing’s CAP report on dangerous chemicals impairing American fertility. For the fellows, there’s reduced sperm count:

And the ladies aren’t being spared either:

What’s to blame? Well:

The following slides provide an overview of this problem and spotlight three chemical groups—phthalates, Bisphenol A, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers—that are linked to reproductive health consequences, including miscarriages, endometriosis, male genital defects, low sperm count, and others. Phthalates and BPA are found in toys, food containers, cosmetics, and many other consumer products. PBDEs are used as flame retardants in household furniture and electronics. Other chemicals also threaten reproductive health, but these three are among the most prevalent in the daily lives of all Americans and are just starting to receive serious attention from the U.S. Congress and federal regulators.

Nick Kristof wrote about some closely related issues, including intersex fish and frogs with extra legs. Be afraid. The overwhelming urgency of the climate change issue has tended to push other environmental concerns off the table, but dangerous chemicals are still bad.

Density and Height

(cc photo by dionhinchcliffe)

Beyond DC makes the point that “density” and “tall buildings” are not synonymous. And, indeed, they’re not. You have parts of the country that basically consist of tallish buildings surrounded by large plazas and parking facilities that are all separated from each other by very wide roads. That kind of tall buildings is not a path to walkable urbanism or environmental sustainability. All very true.

That said, in the specific context of the Washington DC central business district, building denser and building taller largely are synonymous. If you walk around, essentially every building has the largest footprint it’s allowed to have, and essentially every building is built-up to the (very low) maximum height permitted. Downtown Washington has by far the most transit connectivity of any place in the metropolitan area, and so putting more stuff there as opposed to someplace else would make the region more environmentally friendly. But the only way to fit more stuff into Downtown Washington would be to either pave over the National Mall (bad idea) or else build some taller buildings.

Greening the City By Building More Stuff

(CC photo by takomabibelot)

Dave Alpert reports that DC City Council member Mary Cheh is looking for ideas about how to make Washington, DC greener:

The DC Council wants your bold ideas for greening the District of Columbia. On Friday, July 10th, Councilmember Mary Cheh’s Committee on Government Operations and the Environment and GW’s Office of Sustainability are hosing a “Policy Greenhouse” where ten people get to present their 5-minute big ideas.

The ideas need not be quick fixes, they emphasize, but rather ideas that would have a significant impact on the environment or introduce significant innovation. The site lists congestion pricing, vertical farming, “expanded retro-commissioning” (I’m not sure what that is), requiring carbon neutrality for public buildings, or “cool cars” that reflect solar energy as examples of the kinds of ideas.

I think the most important environmental policy insight that the DC government could make is simply to realize that the District, which contains only about 10 percent of the total population of the metropolitan area, has very little influence over the aggregate quantity of stuff that gets built in the metro area. The rate of job growth and population growth in the region is largely driven by independent factors. What DC policy influences is not the total quantity of stuff in the region but what proportion of the stuff winds up located in DC as opposed to located elsewhere in the region. And when you look at it, even without any additional “greener” it’s more ecologically sustainable for an additional household to locate itself in the District than to locate itself in Loudon County. Similarly, it’s “greener” for a new office building to be built in DC than to be built in Tyson’s Corner.

Under the circumstances, the “greenest” thing DC can do is simply to try to attract more stuff into the District—to try to encourage an increase in the quantity of housing units and office space located in DC as opposed to elsewhere. There are various levers to do that, but two measures that suggest themselves are to eliminate or sharply curtail regulations mandating the construction of parking as part of new developments (obviously some parking would still be built without regulatory mandates, but at the margin you’d have more development and less parking) and to permit the construction of taller buildings in the central business district and near Metro stations. Not only is development in DC “greener” than development in the suburbs and exurbs, but increasing the density of DC will make DC “greener” on a per capita basis by decreasing (on average) the distance people need to travel to get to stuff.

Additional measures to reduce the ecological footprint of existing District residents and employers—the sort of thing the Council seems to be primarily looking at—are nice, but the biggest game-changer would be to increase the proportion of DC area jobs and people that are actually located in DC.

Innovation in Climate Policy

To meet the kind of emission reduction targets the planet needs, we’re obviously counting on a health degree of innovation coming into play. The expectation is that human ingenuity can and will develop some new ideas about ways to generate clean energy, as well as new ideas about how to use energy more efficiently. This is particularly true when you think about the situation in the developing world. We’re hoping to see places like China and India be able to start operating in a climate-constrained way, but we also want to see a continuation of the kind of rapid growth in Asia that’s done so much to reduce the poverty rate around the world. The most plausible mechanism for that to happen would be for the developed world to devise some new technologies that, though they may involve high R&D and startup costs, can be deployed reasonably cheaply once in place.

The Brookings Institution has a recent report out calling for $20-30 billion per year in federal investment in energy innovation. Mark Muro observes that the Waxman-Markey bill, in its current version, involves just $9 billion to this purpose. This is, of course, one of the costs of needing to give in to industry demands that a substantial swathe of carbon permits be given away rather than auctioned off. That leaves the short-term emissions target in place, but it deprives us of revenue that can be used for measures—like R&D—that ease the transition. I take it that that door is already shut at this point, but Muro observes that the Department of Energy’s FY 2010 budget request would, if passed, “begin to build a powerful energy-innovation system in the United States by broadly engaging the scientific community through the funding of Energy Frontier Research Centers, conducting transformative research through ARPA-E, and starting eight of its own ‘energy innovation hubs’ for translational research to get new energy technologies into the market.”

I have a feeling a Green Development Bank could help here too.

Green Development Bank

If we had adopted a comprehensive clean energy program, including a cap-and-trade system, back in 2001 or back at the time of the Kyoto Protocol, then things might have looked very different during the credit boom period. In particular, with cheap money available, large-scale investments in green electricity generation would have looked like a high-payoff investment opportunity. True, any particular investment would have been risky since none of the technology has been deployed on a truly large scale. But the potential upside would have been huge.

Instead we got, well, what we got. And now that the country is getting serious about reforming our energy policies, the climate for financing large-scale investments has become terrible. With markets incredibly risk-averse, it’s difficult for any kind of project that doesn’t have a long track-record behind it to get off the ground. And innovative green technology, by definition, lacks such a track-record. One potential solution would be a government-financed “Green Bank,” as described in a new proposal from Karen Kornbluh and John Podesta.

Making Costs Explicit

Kevin Drum writes about Google’s PowerMeter project, a nifty web application that will tell San Diego Gas & Electric customers (and in the future, presumably customers of more firms) exactly how much electricity they’re using. Kevin observes that “The simple act of making people aware of their electricity usage can probably generate a surprising amount of conservation.” I tend to agree, and I think it’s something the behavior economics lovers in the White House should find appealing. Here’s another idea of Kevin’s:

And relatively speaking, it’s cheap. This kind of thing could help in other areas too. Here’s a cheap and simple idea, for example: place the estimated 5-year cost of gasoline on the sticker of every new car. EPA could easily come up with a formula based on average car use and recent gasoline prices, and it would almost certainly make fuel-efficient cars more attractive if people saw the savings of buying one right in front of their faces when they were comparing cars. More like this, please.

I have a related idea, that’s smart but politically toxic. It would be a good idea for the federal government to set an explicit target for gasoline prices over a ten-year period. The idea would be to have gasoline prices slope gently upward. When market prices deviate from the gentle upward slope, federal gas taxes would automatically adjust—going either up or down to compensate. That way a whole range of economic actors—homebuilders, city planners, car companies, retailers, customers, etc.—could plan sensibly. It would also make it easier to do the kind of EPA estimates Kevin is talking about. What we do right now—where on Monday and Wednesday politicians call for more fuel efficient vehicles and then on Tuesday and Thursday they call for cheaper gas—is confusing and counterproductive.