(Nice enough post, but I think you misjudge the problem--the problem has little to do with the nature of science as a provisional enterprise, constantly being revised towards a better understanding.  It's that our policy prescriptions don't lend themselves to a similarly fluid revision.  The major criticism of a carbon tax, for example, is that you have to guess what tax level is appropriate to get the reductions needed --- apparently because our imagination is so impoverished that the powers that be can't figure out how to craft legislation that allows for an EPA administrator who modifies the carbon taxes as needed to get the reductions required.)

The 5% Project

Once again, I think the analogy between WW2 and GHG climate disaster is informative.  Good points Sean, gives me something to think about, as you usually do.

No need to be a perfect leader if you can get that to happen.  Just listen to the feedback that thought produces and adjust the direction.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

What we need is a compass point that all policy should point to. In fact, better than 350 PPM might even be 1.5 degrees C.

The point here is that our scientific understanding changes and the closer policy can stick to the most basic science, the better the chance that it can be on target.

The problem is the structure of the science becomes shakier the more derivative it becomes.

So first you do an analysis that says 1.5 to 2 degrees C temperature rise is the most we can withstand (due to the complexity there are already errors). Then you do an analysis, based on that, saying that 550 then 450 then 350 is the PPM of carbon dioxide we can withstand (an analysis which compounds the previous errors and introduces errors of its own). Then you do an analysis that says 80% by 2050, and that multiplies the errors again.

This is why I asked Nadler to introduce a resolution that aims the USA at a target that is as close to the root science as possible. A compass point to which all future policy points.

Just as fundamentally, we need science at the root of policy which has the least number of variables to argue about. And we need flexibility of policy, as you say, to change as new science comes in.

So here's my call: a simple concurrent bill in the House and Senate that says simply that we the people of the United States agree that we should aim for 350 PPM atmospheric carbon dioxide, understanding that the science may adjust that number, but that in the meantime all other policy should aim towards it.

Of course, I'm just a schlub, not a climate scientist or a policy wonk. But at the same time, it seems to me that we need a way forward that makes sense to schlubs.

All the best,

Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man

If Congress passed a carbon tax, and gave EPA wide latitude about the level to set it at, the politics would prevent EPA from setting it high enough.  If Congress provided a range, regulations would then get set at the low end of the range.

Unfortunate, but true -- this happens over and over.  When the Clean Air Act is most specific, much more gets done.  Examples:  acid rain, ambient ozone.

You want an effective carbon trading program?  Congress should specify the numerical reductions and the year they have to happen by, and make it an absolute requirement.  

oops... got stuck on caps lock >.>

Well, I got your point anyway.  People who make policies are scared to admit they might have been wrong, they're even scared to admit that the people who made policies 200 years ago might have been wrong.

not that, you know, there's anything wrong with right-wing-anti-environment-beef-eating-gun-toting-bible-beating-creationalist-fanatics... except the anti-environment part... and the bible beating... and the beef eating... and the guns..... the fanatic part is a lil scarey too, especially when you add the guns <.<

At least part of the answer seems to be a lack of wisdom¹. Ordinary human beings, even very clever ones (intelligence + creativity²), are not really very sapient when it comes to global-scale wicked problem solving. The missing element is the judgment that comes from wisdom³. The latter is based on rich tacit knowledge of how the world works, hopefully based on the currently best scientific understanding. But it also depends on knowledge of human interactions and human nature gained by experience.

And all of this depends on a capacity of the brain which I call sapience⁴. Unfortunately sapience seems to be an underdeveloped capacity in Homo sapiens. The best evidence for this is all around us. Look at the state of the world today! We have cleverness aplenty. We are inventive and good technological problem solvers. But we are not very good at setting governance policies when the scale and complexity of issues reach the levels we see today⁵. We just keep muddling through and hoping our immense cleverness will be sufficient to get us through.

Democracy fails to raise competent leaders for two reasons. The voters are not wise and there are so few sufficiently wise people in the population that identifying them is nearly impossible (they are wise enough not to seek public office through what passes as a political process!)

Ironically, the solution to our problems may require abandonment of democratic governance and a concerted effort by clever people who care to find a cadre of highly sapient people (a council of elders!) to make judgment calls based on the best science and understanding of nature in its fullest sense. People like E.O. Wilson and Herman Daly, and Nancy Andreasen come to mind immediately. There are more. Most are scientists, or started out as scientists, but they are all humanists AND naturists. I would put my trust in a panel of such people to dictate what needs to be done in the future to save whatever can be saved of our world. It is a wise gamble in my mind.

1. Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

2. Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

3. Hogarth, Robin (1980). Judgment and Choice, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

4. Mobus, George (2008). What is sapience?, personal blog.

5. Mobus, George (2008). Social organization, governance, and sapience, personal blog.

And when there is an attempt to go to a Plan B (recent attempts get relief from ethanol mandates) warring interests fight to maintain those interests. Science that does not support those interests is rejected. Few politicians will support science that will anger their voting base and therefore cost them their job.

Public opinion influences politicians. Although  science can give direction to those who influence public opinion, politicians are rarely directly influenced by science. They are voting machines. The goal should always be to influence public opinion and to point out to the politicians what that opinion is. The only thing standing between politicians and financial backers are voters.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

So I agree with the first principle, but IMHO first principles sometimes have to bend in the face of contingent realities.

grist.org

A war chest, albeit risk capital, philanthropy, or public funds, is critical, urgent.  Caveats be damned.  

We are in the most dangerous struggle for survival in human history.  There is nothing uncertain about the consequences of failure.

Let me be clear: the CAA has done wonders to lower criteria pollutants.  That's good.  But it has also increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  That's bad.

EPA staff - not the big policy wonks - said that much of what California and other states want to CO2 is some hard and fast rules and that they could do it. They backed the California CO2 regulation that the EPA Administrator rejected under OMB and White House pressure. I think you will find EPA staff very knowledgeable about how to harmonize CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) with ozone, particulate, and toxic air quality regulations.  -sam

Onward through the fog

This isn't to say they're bad people, of course.  But I don't see any likelihood of constructive reform on environmental standards coming from the staff-level, nor higher-level changes being supported by the staff.  But the changes are critical if we're going to act meaningfully on GHG regs.  It's not widely appreciated, but so long as CAA rules remain as they are, they are in conflict with CO2 reduction, in the sense that you cannot install any BACT/MACT compliant end-of-pipe pollution control device without increasing your CO2 emissions.  Ergo, GHG regs must be accompanied by an overhaul of the CAA.  And as the second largest regulatory document in the federal government (second only to the tax code), that will not be easy.

EPA staff would like nothing better than to be help guide greenhouse gas legislation now.

But I think the resistance you may be seeing to changing the existing new source review provisions of the Clean Air Act are a result of the current toxic political atmosphere, and the likelihood of unforseen nefarious changes to the Clean Air Act that could well happen if it were opened up.

Contrast that with sites like RenewableEnergyWorld.com, where most of the article writers post something -- often making controversial claims (especially on biofuels) -- and then never respond to the critics who comments (as I know BioD, AmazingDrX and GreyFlcn can attest).

I write this without even having (yet) read this article or the comments, just noticing that 1/4 of the comments are from Sean himself.

These are only my personal opinions.

The ideal pollution regulation, from a market point of view, is a specified allowance of each criteria pollutant per unit of useful output,  given equally to all generators of heat or power.  This levels the playing field, making every electric generator and every thermal generator buy allowances for all pollution above the amount allowed.  Every cleaner plant gains a source of revenue, thus encouraging clean plants.  The allowance can be adjusted down over time, lots of details, not important to your question of how CAA hurts the environment versus a better control methodology.

What CAA does is grant emission ceiling unique to each plant in PPM of exhaust concentration, which then applies until and unless the plant makes a major modification, in which case it must meet current BACT.  Problems? 1) No relationship in methodology to efficiency, 2)No credit for extracting more useful output than other plants, 3) if you come back later to improve energy productivity, you lose the permit, 4) the allowed pollution does not ratchet down over time, and 5) Each new plant must reduce the pollution from their plant to BACT, without regard to the cheapest way to lower emissions.

Now to results.  Over thirty years, every time we try to develop a new, cleaner power plant that recycles waste energy and achieves 65% to 95% efficiency, we must jump CAA hurdles.  The plant must be cleaner than all existing plants, but then sell its product in compeition with the old plants.  This often ruins the economics of a new plant, thus preserving and enhancing the value of the old plants.  When we find a way to recycle carbon black tail gas and produce 30 megawatts of power with no incremental fuel, no incremental CO2, the carbon black company is afraid the change will trigger NSR.  We fixed that with a special EPA MACT (May of 2002) but face the problem in other industries.

Finally, there are many opportunities to eliminate one ton of a criteria pollutant at old plants that would cost as little as 1% of the cost of removing one more ton from a new plant.  But the new plant cannot typically trade emissions,so must achieve the current BACT at its plant.  This has two bad results.  First, society pays $100 to remove a unit of pollution that could have been removed elsewhere for $1 dollar - bad use of resources.  But the bigger problem, and further answer to the question, is that the potential new plant, which would double the efficiency of the old plant, is simply not built, because of the excessive cost of removing the last unit of pollutant.  

If you were in the business of supplying large rocks, would you go screen beach sand, or would you go where the big rocks are found?  The CAA tells plant developers who are using prime movers with 3% of the emissions of existing plants that they must add end-of-pipe controls - screen for rocks - to reduce the emissions to 1% of the old plants.

We can do better!

Tom Casten, Chair, Recycled Energy Development LLC

My comments were only intended to explain current fears about re-opening the Clean Air Act in a toxic political environment.

Hopefully the new Adminstration will bring new opportunities.  It had better, anyway.

ugh. it's not hard to imagine how this came to be, though, when thinking about smog as maybe an absolute level of breathability in an area. wanting to avoid trading public health for economic intensity.

"2)No credit for extracting more useful output than other plants"

this doesn't sound like it would need an overhaul, although clearly an overhaul of the whole industry is on its way, as this is a natural outgrowth of an involuntary overhaul of civilization.

"3) if you come back later to improve energy productivity, you lose the permit"

ugh. i wouldn't want to go without a review, though.

"4) the allowed pollution does not ratchet down over time"

oh -- it kinda will -- not much to worry about, in this dept.

"5) Each new plant must reduce the pollution from their plant to BACT, without regard to the cheapest way to lower emissions"

beware: an open system of offsets is not the future. do not plan on it being so.

Don't write policies that are so heavily proscribed that they are unable to adapt as The Truth is more fully revealed.

I'm guessing it may be a typo, but if proscribed is truly what you meant I don't understand the usage in this context. Could you clarify, e.g. with an example of such a policy?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

In my defense, I did say I was fallible.

Given the paucity of data and the complexity of the climate system, I find it hard to believe that anyone can predict with any level of certainty what might happen in 100 years and how humans might adapt to it.

I was curious if anyone would go on record here that there is a possibility that AGW will be no big deal?  

Can good, intellegent people look at the available data and evidence and come to different conclusions?

To be sure, there is a probabilistic difference between the chance that increasing CO2 concentrations are trapping heat in our atmosphere (very high, damn near certain) and the likelihood that 100 years from now, a specific point on the globe will have a specific climate (which, as you say, in a complex system is very hard to predict with certainty).  But that's a scale issue, readily addressed by any decent policy.  I can't be certain that a specific store in downtown L.A. will be burglarized this week, but I can be certain that there will be some burglaries somewhere in the city, and we should maintain a police force and judiciary accordingly.

Where this does get problematic though - per Lieberman-Warner is when policy gets into those details, specifying exactly who needs to be compensated over the next 42 years based on our assumed "losers" - from low-income energy users to native American tribes to estuaries.  Yes, we should contemplate those probabilities, but it is awfully dangerous to write a policy that shuffles all the money to technologies and parties based on 2008 conventional wisdom rather than build a system that will optimally allocate resources in real-time.

But the point here is not to say that I am aware of any scientifically-literate person who would assert that AGW is no-big deal - but a scientifically honest one might admit that we can't be certain of what specific sectors of the economy and globe will be specifically affected.

Of course, review by the legislative body alone might not be enough, and it might prove far too time consuming.  A Supreme Court of Science, enabled with the power to review legislation 10 years down the road based on public data, could be a powerful force in correcting flawed legislation, and would put pressure on those drafting laws to consider the review.  I would imagine a nomination procedure similar to that of the Supreme Court, accepting that the court would reflect the political will of the ruling party to a certain degree. Exactly where it would sit within the government is a question, but perhaps a President interested in science (i.e. in 2009 and beyond) might expand a cabinet post as a start to include this "court".  

I quickly dismissed the idea that a council of wise elders would be infallible in guiding humanity to the promised land when I read it earlier this morning, but it did spark a series of thoughts.  In many ways, the founders envisioned the Supreme Court as being the a council of elders, albeit controlled by checks and balances (and thankfully so, for as they say, one man's Justice Scalia is another man's treasure).  

If the complexities of the laws upon which the nation is built are such that they require oversight, isn't the science on which all of society depends deserving of similar guidance and review?  

Personally, I would love to see legislators have to argue in front of independent scientists to defend the impacts of their policies.  Certainly, it would sharpen the legislative process and shine a spotlight on the scientific proscess, no?  This reads, I am sure, like an idea to discuss over a bottle of wine.  If so, don't criticize me too much, I am after all the Casten Family pusher, what with my professional preference for Cabernet over kilocals and all.  

You have argued elloquently for changing the regulatory model.  I think that is a much better approach than the Lieberman-Warner-Boxer mess that the senate is debating.

Maybe you're right.  Maybe you're not.  If we're both honest, we admit we don't know for certain.  But what is certain is that virtually all natural process change in non-linear ways, from populations to albedo effects to erosion.  And when non-linear systems are perturbed, they get volatile.  What they average out to is a hell of a lot less important than what the extremes look like.  That risk demands action in my book.  But there is no more reason for the regulatory action to specify a particular path, technology or affected party than there is for a regulatory action to do nothing on the gamble that cold fusion/solar/wind/magic technology X will save the day.  

Humility about our mortal limitations shouldn't be confused with inaction.  And that's the core of my point.  Good leadership is not the same as good science.  But we need both.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything.  It just seems to me that if we are worried about CO2 we should be shutting down oil fired power generation and the oldest and most inefficient coal plants.  

If you want a cap and trade system then fine, just divide up the tax evenly among the 300 million US citizens and write everyone a rebate check. We don't

We don't need Lieberman-Warner-Boxer to send all the money to Washington and then allow the politicians to buy votes with it.  

Politicians have a way of unleashing unintended consequences.

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