Net metering broke through the Albany slumber this session largely for three reasons: both legislative houses had new chairs of their respective Energy committees and each brought a fresh, collaborative approach to the issue; several alternative technology business groups, including ACENY and Sun Edison, worked closely with NRDC and enviros to execute a disciplined legislative strategy; and the tumultuous oil price spikes refashioned the electric market in a matter of weeks, making solar and wind competitive products.
Sen. George Maziarz succeeded Jim Wright as Energy chair early in the session. At around the same time, Assemblymember Kevin Cahill was appointed Energy after his predecessor, Paul Tonko, left the Assembly to head NYSERDA. Both chairs wanted to pass a bill, but the rhythm of the session early on was more a cautious minuet than a tango, until energy prices drowned pretty much every else thing out.Sen. Owen Johnson, an influential Long Island Republican, passed his bill first, which allowed solar and methane technologies to net meter. Assemblyman Steve Englebright passed a four-technology bill in his house, which included solar, wind, methane and fuel cells. Our main political goal was to get as many technologies as possible in the bill without coming out of the session empty-handed. We organized a clutch of lobby days, some with enviros-only, some with solar companies, some with wind firms. More quietly, we met over a period of weeks through the spring, with a number of Western New York senators in a delegation that included NRDC and wind and solar business leaders. Between the steady political advocacy and the volatile market, senator after senator dropped their opposition. Finally, both chairs agreed to move several bills here at session's end, which will include solar, methane and wind.
It's nice to win some times!
In only somewhat related news on the other coast, this article ran a few days ago highlighting the controversy surrounding the siting of transmission to get renewable electricity from a proposed large-scale concentrating solar power facility in Mojave Desert to San Diego. The solar power plant would anchor a number of renewable energy projects, but as noted in the article:
[San Diego Gas and Electric's] $1.5-billion power line would cut 23 miles through the middle of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a spot known for its hiking trails, wildflowers, palm groves, cacti and spectacular mountain views.
Not surprisingly, the transmission proposal has run into stiff opposition. Some other environmental groups argue that SDG&E should avoid the transmission all together through rooftop PV. As NRDC's advocacy for net metering makes clear, we certainly agree that we need more of that, but ultimately that won't be enough. We don't know yet if the solar plant is the best option, but we have said that if it is, the transmission line should follow a different that we believe will significantly reduce the impacts. Here is the letter we filed opposing the proposed line and advancing the alternative.
SDG&E's VP for renewables is right when he's quoted:
"It's a trade-off," said Stuart Hemphill, Edison's vice president for renewable and alternative power. "Clean energy perhaps requires building infrastructure in potentially sensitive areas. There's no way around it."
But that doesn't mean that we can afford to give up trying to minimize those tradeoffs and the impacts of that infrastructure. That's why NRDC is part of the California Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative, which has as part of its mission statement the goal of planning for renewable energy transmission needs so that they can happen where they are needed and are developed in an appropriate and environmentally responsible way. We need to expand this type of planning nationally. It will reduce the unnecessary impacts from renewable energy infrastructure and, almost as important, it will reduce the controversy around this infrastructure and thus speed its development.
]]>Poorly sited, wind farms can be environmentally destructive and there is a valid range of opinions about the visual impacts. However, the challenges of global warming and benefits of wind power are too significant for us to lightly prejudge or short circuit the necessary environmental siting review and permitting process.
That was the point I tried to make in my letter. I assumed that since I didn't say that NRDC "endorsed" or "supported" the St. Lucie project that no one would assume that we did. And for the record, we have not taken any position on the project.
Hind sight being 20-20, I'm not surprised that some took our support for wind in general to be support for the project. And this happened in the first article that reported on our letter, which ran with the headline "Turbine plan gains support from National Resources Defense Council." (Yes, they got NRDC's name wrong both in the original article and in the corrected one.) And boy, did I hear an earful from a number of very passionate local advocates.
I have since talked to the reporter and he has corrected the story with this one.
I have also since read this article in NRDC's Onearth Magazine, which mentions that NRDC is working with the Surfrider Foundation to help protect the coastline of...where else but St. Lucie County. The article paints a compelling picture of a beautiful part of the country at high risk from global warming and poor environmental management.
I have no idea if the site that FLP has proposed for St. Lucie is a suitable site for wind, but we all--even the most passionate defenders of our local environment--have to struggle with what we can do to help fight global warming. If we say no to a wind farm or solar panels or some other solution to global warming, we have to think long and hard about where else those technologies should go and what other solutions we can do locally.
We cannot afford to sacrifice our natural treasures or fragile and endangered ecosystems in our fight against global warming. The cure must not be worse than the disease. But there are going to be tough decisions to make, and the fight against global warming is not one that we can afford to lose.
]]>Any number of oil and coal patch republicans or dems would probably vie for the leadership of the first group, but the ranking member of Energy and Commerce, Joe Barton (R-Texas) would get my vote. He has a bill to repeal the recent RFS and reinstate the 2005 RFS. This would cut the corn ethanol mandate in half and entirely eliminate the advanced biofuels requirements and all of the minimum lifecycle GHG standards and land and wildlife safeguards.
The leader of the second group is Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) who has a bill (H.R. 5236) to replace the current definition of eligible woody biomass, which includes the safeguards, with the version that passed in the Senate last year, which effectively allows in all wood.
Now the politics here are really strange because of course the anti-biofuels fossil fuel group was more than happy to support the anti-safeguard crowd, but many of the anti-safeguard are strongly pro-corn. So when Rep. Herseth Sandlin testified about her bill she had to spend half her time talking about how great corn ethanol is and Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill) basically yelled at his colleagues. "This is very frustrating, how short-sighted we are to walk away [from corn ethanol]," he boomed, and then at the end, he added that what we really needed to do was pass the Herseth Sandlin bill and add liquid coal to the mix.
Adding to the array of strange bedfellows, four environmental groups sent a letter to the Subcommittee's chair adding their voice to that of the Governor of Texas, and a bunch of Senate Republicans calling for a waiver of the current RFS.
A voice of reason came in a statement from the Chair of Energy and Commerce, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). As the first line of a comprehensive article in the E&E Daily (subscrip) by Alex Kaplum put it: "House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) threw cold water yesterday on the growing cry to scale back the federal ethanol mandate Congress approved last year."
Among other things in his statement, he says the following:
I would observe that the ink had hardly dried on this new law when the clamoring began to alter the RFS, and these requests for Congressional intervention continue. In my view, amendments to the law at this time would be unwise and could lead to unintended consequences.
I believe that all stakeholders would be well-advised to consult with the EPA as it develops the rule and try to address any concerns within that forum. If unresolved issues still remain after the rule is finalized, there may be need for Congressional action. To act in advance of that date, however, undermines important processes.
Another good article in E&E Daily on Monday by Ben Geman got my perspective on these various efforts right:
Nathanael Greene, a biofuels expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said biofuels are among the many factors that are contributing to increased food costs. But he does not see altering the biofuels mandate as the answer.
Instead, he argues that lawmakers should "build on top" of the mandate by altering biofuels tax credit and tariff policy. Lawmakers should encourage biofuels that fare best in terms of greenhouse gas reductions and other environmental factors, he said, which would thereby steer production toward cleaner fuels that do not compete with food.
"The solution to a lot of the global warming concerns, particularly the land-use emissions concerns, and the solution to getting biofuels out of the food price equation are the same thing," he said.
Greene is also concerned that reopening the mandate would allow for "mischief," such as a push to weaken environmental restrictions in last year's energy bill.
The Herseth Sandlin bill certainly qualifies as mischief in my book. While my testimony provides a full explanation of why we think the RFS got the definition of renewable biomass and woody biomass specifically right, I'll summarize our points here:
First it's important to understand that our wild landscapes and federal lands are only becoming more critical to wildlife and for their ecosystem services and as stores of carbon as global warming puts increased pressure on our lands. So the need for safeguards is greater than every. Still the new RFS allows the vast majority of woody feedstock that is likely to ever be economically viable for biofuels. It only excludes: old growth, few remaining grasslands, our most sensitive landscapes, federal lands, and the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations.
In other words, all the material from a forest plantation can be used, as can the material from a naturally managed forest (one that uses natural regeneration). But you can't convert a natural forest to a forest plantation. Plantations may look like forests but they're deserts from the perspective of biodiversity.
The federal land exclusion is a big sticking point for Herseth Sandlin, who has a number of interests that want to harvest the Black Hills for energy. But "preventative thinning" from a forest is ostensibly to restore the forest health and reduce the risk of fires. This means that you don't want the material to grow back, which makes it an open loop source of carbon not unlike the carbon from coal. Furthermore, the evidence that thinning helps reduce the risk of fire is uncertain at best and there are studies that suggest that it actually makes fires worse. And finally, for that material that is already being cut and left in the forests, there are better more local and more appropriately scaled options such as producing heat and power for local communities.
The only thing that I would add to Ben's E&E Daily article is that I actually offered three steps that Congress should take to build on the RFS:
Some Amazonian forests are directly cleared for soy farms. Farmers also purchase large expanses of cattle pasture for soy production, effectively pushing the ranchers farther into the Amazonian frontier or onto lands unsuitable for soy production. In addition, higher soy costs tend to raise global beef prices because soy-based livestock feeds become more expensive, creating an indirect incentive for forest conversion to pasture. Finally, the powerful Brazilian soy lobby is a key driving force behind initiatives to expand Amazonian highways and transportation networks in order to transport soybeans to market, and this is greatly increasing access to forests for ranchers, loggers, and land speculators.
Biopact, in covering the letter, quotes Laurance as saying: "The evidence of a corn connection to the Amazon is circumstantial, but it's about as close as you ever get to a smoking gun." I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it's circumstantial. It's complicated and indirect, but it is inevitable given current market rules and regulations.
So what are we going to do about it? Well, as I've written about the energy bill (H.R.6) just signed into law sets lifecycle global warming pollution reduction standards for all new biofuels used to comply with the expanded renewable fuel standard. Importantly, the definition of lifecycle GHG reads:
The term `lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions' means the aggregate quantity of greenhouse gas emissions (including direct emissions and significant indirect emissions such as significant emissions from land use changes), as determined by the Administrator, related to the full fuel lifecycle....
The phrase "as determined by the Administrator" (EPA Administrator that is) is a clue that while the definition is specifically intended to address the type of indirect impacts that Laurance is writing about, the benefits of the RFS GHG standards depend on good implementing regulations. Of course NRDC will be working on this, but it's complicated and a genuine challenge to get the accounting protocol right.
Ultimately, what is needed is an economic and regulatory "fence" around the carbon- and biodiversity-rich natural ecosystems of the world. The Wall St. Journal reported recently on some promising radar developments that could help make international agreements establishing such a fence possible. There's still significant challenges before measurements of deforestation, forest thinning, and the related carbon emissions will be accurate enough that markets for reduce deforestation can really function, but it seems like we'll get there. Some type of fence is critical to protect these ecosystems not just from biofuels but also from food and urban sprawl, and with deforestation contributing about 20% of global GHG emissions, this fence is critical to stopping global warming.
Importantly, countries like Brazil appear keen on getting these markets to work and Brazil in particular has shown (see the Biopact post linked to above) that efforts to reduce deforestation can make a real difference.
The combination of technology-neutral, performance-based biofuels policies that drive the lowest carbon fuels and international agreements to protect our natural ecosystems and their stores of carbon is the ultimate package of market rules to make biofuels all they can be from a climate perspective. Of course, there's more than just climate to "green" renewable fuels. Laurance also has an article in the current issue of Science about a new study that attempts to look at non-carbon environmental impacts. (The Science article is here, but is by subscription only. The study is by R. Zah et al and is German. If anyone knows of a translation, I would love to see it.) Apparently, the study finds that most, but not all, types of biofuels perform worse than petroleum fuels on these non-carbon impacts. The non-carbon impacts of petroleum fuels are pretty big (e.g. this set of posts from my friend and colleague Kate Wing). Ultimately, we need to address to full range of impacts from all our energy sources, but I believe that a comprehensive approach to advancing the lowest carbon fuels will provide the most benefits across the board.
]]>Now the good news: Reuters reports that the Malaysian palm oil industry is blaming environmental groups and their educational efforts around the environmental impacts of palm oil for a 17.5% decline in exports to Europe. More power to our colleagues in Europe. Nothing like a good drop in demand to wake up the market.
This seems like an area where we should be able to influence the market. To paraphrase the closing lines of the Sky News video, the roads to Hell through cleared rainforests are paved with green intentions. So shouldn't we greens be able to warn people off this awful path? They've got a head start on us here in the US, both in terms of using palm oil and recognizing its downside. That's a large part of the reason that we agreed to work with Hawaiian Electric Company--to get an American company to stand up and acknowledge that biofuels can be done right or they can be done wrong and to commit to doing them right.
Ultimately, biodiesel is just speeding up a problem that growing population would create anyway. The Sky News video also points out that China is Indonesia's largest customer. Economics being what they are, we also need international agreements that put a financial and regulatory fence around rainforests and other precious wild places. Only when it is in the financial interest of the people that live in these parts of the world will they be safe.
Fortunately, there's even some good news on that front. This post ran on Biopact back in May and tells how Brazil has cut its rate of deforestation in half and how a policy of "compensated reduction" could be part of the package of international agreements..
But with 10 years to save the orangutan and also to get serious about global warming, we have to step up our efforts now.
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