Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I spoke recently at one of the many national meet-ups for the Sunrise Movement on the Green New Deal, and someone asked me for more details on my numbers and frames of reference on combating what I think we ought to call “Climate Disruption.”
My reply is really a refutation, or serious “qualification,” if you prefer, in part, of Governor Hogan’s State of the State address’s claims on Climate Change...so here it is:
Yes, I'd be happy to, because it was going to be a part of a direct critique of Governor Hogan's State of the State address delivered on Wed. January 30th in Annapolis. I've started that but as events are moving so fast nationally, I don't know if I will complete it but the research trail I covered to address this part of it is still pretty fresh and useful for many other policy discussions. Here's what I was focusing on:
We pushed for landmark legislation that cemented our position as a national and international leader in combating greenhouse gas emissions.
We expanded the Climate Change Commission and implemented clean air standards that are stronger than 48 other states and nearly twice as strong as the Paris Accord recommendations.
I'll give you the outline now and fill in the links shortly. The expert technical guy I respect is Kevin Anderson, from Great Britain, who has been critical in detail on the Paris Accord from Dec. 2015 but fair, in that he supports the common meeting and discussion, even as the metrics of measurement and the self-created goals of each nation are all over the place. Anderson believes that the West needs to reduce its annual Green House Gas emissions by 10-13%, closer to the higher figure, over the next 10 years or so to have any hope of keeping the temperature rise to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Anderson says the UN team of scientists bend to the economics section of their report for methodology, for the scope and speed of their reduction methods: hidden from discussion is the assumption that we will have the tools, as yet unproved, to take a lot of C02 out of the atmosphere...sea and air transport emissions are left out, and they have been where the largest rapid increases have occurred; and land-use changes have been left out as well because the measurements are so uncertain. The scientists defer to the economists in terms of what is feasible in remedy scope and time frames because the economists are the buffers between the science and the politics and the politics is where the roadblocks are. And who controls the jobs and funding behind the scenes.
As you listen to the link lecture that the straight-shooting and courageous Anderson gives, you'll begin asking yourself if he sees these pressures to hold back and intimidate even in British academe, with its long history of academic freedom, even through the worst of the Cold War, what it is like in America? Well, you know how I'll fill that in for Maryland, where political caution is a long tradition. Anderson also frames up his tough love regime by reference to a carbon budget, how many tons of GHG can be emitted each year to have decent odds (and he names those odds) of stopping the temp. rise at between 1.5 -2 degrees C. He says it can't be done with just supply side changes (renewable energy sources) but must include demand side reductions in energy consumption. I agree. And that's where it blends into the Green New Deal's policies. Here is Anderson’s bio, just for assurance: tyndall.ac.uk/…
How does Hogan get to his claims? Well no wonder he stayed in the stratosphere of generalizations. Here goes, and it's a fragmented mess of MD laws and the RGGI of New England and Mid-Atl. states, but not PA or Va, too conservative. To condense greatly, in the spring of 2018 Hogan signed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Extension Act, here http://www.wfmd.com/2018/04/05/gov-hogan-signs-bills-on-thursday/ which committed the RGGI states to a 30% reduction in just C02 levels by 2030, so about 3% per year (compare to Anderson's metrics); what is more, activists in NE argued, while these negotiations were on the table, for a stronger 5% annual reduction but Maryland did not go for that: too expensive and too disruptive...
The other law which gives a frame of reference for Maryland's goals is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act of 2009, which called for 25% GHG reductions from a 2006 baseline by 2020, so around 2% annual rate, but that was strengthened in 2016 to 40% reductions by 2030, still only 4% a year. Now Maryland spreads out these reductions in the Climate Change Commission's Action Plan, in over 150 programs, making it nearly impossible for all but the full time expert to monitor and separate PR from actual achievements.
A good part of my 55 page paper this December on Electricity Markets was focused on Maryland's Renewable Energy Portfolio, and if the games inside this sprawling Climate plan are as extensive as those inside our RPS, who knows what reductions we are actually achieving. Here and Here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/10/1818206/-Sifting-Through-the-Ashes-Electricity-Markets-in-the-Age-of-Neoliberalism-Climate-Disruption;
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/11/1818301/-Why-the-Largest-Proposed-Solar-Farm-East-of-the-Rockies-is-going-to-Virginia-not-rural-Maryland
I think the Gov’s numbers and speech rely more on what is going on with RGGI than any other factor, so its time to "deconstruct” that mechanism. It is a Cap and Trade program which also sets a price on carbon/ton, a Carbon Tax, laughably low at between $1.76 and $8 since 2009; experts say no meaningful pressure to cut back on emissions and fossil fuel sources until the price is between $150 and $400 per ton, but the low prices, what it costs the polluter to buy their way out of actually reducing emissions, from someone who has actually physically done the reductions, generates funds for a lot of other programs, including efficiency ones which reduce demand. So green groups love it and clam up on the overall effectiveness of RGGI in "Anderson" terms. RGGI also only regulates C02, not other greenhouse gases like methane, and only regulates power plants greater than 25 MW in size, about 180 if my memory serves me. So what it leaves out by design is enormous. If one begins to ask what their baseline emissions were when they started, the program becomes even more questionable: they set the original "cap" higher than the actual emissions they say they measured coming out of the stacks! You have to really dig to get to this...My friend Bill Wolfe, one the nation’s best environmental policy minds, says some modelers in this field set the emissions on computer projections that have the emitters running 24/365...but RGGI insists their baselines come from actual physical measurements...have't been able to vet those claims.
And here are the criticisms of the RGGI system:
From the Right, the Cato Institute, which essentially says the reductions it may have achieved have come from the fracked gas revolution and substitution of natural gas for goal...again, ignoring the methane/leakage issue: I think they have something here, beyond ideology:
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2018/review-regional-greenhouse-gas-initiative
And here is a very interesting Cong. Res. Service report on it:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41836.pdf
And now, here is Kevin Anderson's very digestible lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gJ78vDU17Y
___, I invite you to dig into his credentials and his numerous public lectures on line. He makes Ben Grumbles and Larry Hogan, and many Dems inside MD look like, at best, dissemblers and evaders of the harsh realities of where we are and how drastically and fast we have to change. At least the October 2018 IPCC UN report did not mince words when it said the scope and speed of the needed economic changes were "without precedent." Exact quote from the NY Times article on it the next day: "..transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has'no documented historic precedent.'”
____, right now, Larry Hogan, Ben Grumbles and the Congressional Democratic Leadership are on another wavelength entirely from Kevin Anderson: candor, depth and understanding - and the politics of it.
And if he is not strong enough for you, and clear enough, here's the worst case, from Rupert Read, also in England. It's built out of the much more rapid release of methane gases because we have underestimated the rate of warming and melt over the deep sources of the trapped methane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCxFPzdO0Y&t=2957s
And here is Read's background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Read
I'm sure that I've left a lot out, and others can do better, but that's it for now.
Best,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD