Wildness Creeps Back

San Francisco -- For eight years under George Bush, America's wilderness faced a systematic assault from the federal government. By the end of the first Bush term, more than 100 million acres that previously enjoyed federal protection had lost it.

Since last November's election, the Bush legacy has been unraveling, and the progress on this front has been encouragingly swift. Last month the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued a biological function that will require fundamental changes in how the government operates California's water system. The biologists concluded that salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon, and killer whales all would be at risk unless the amount of water that remains in the rivers and deltaic systems is increased -- which means less diversion for irrigation.
"What is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems," said Rod Mcinnis, administrator of the NMFS Southwest Regional Office. In addition to mandating a reduction in irrigation supplies by another five to seven percent a year, NMFS made other suggestions: The boldest is to open up the Red Bluff Diversion Dam on the Sacramento River to allow Chinook salmon and sturgeon unimpeded passage upriver.
Given that this decision comes in the middle of a serious drought that is hammering both farmers and fisheries, this announcement was yet another sign that science is back in Washington!
Then this week a U.S. District Court here in the Bay Area threw out what, I believe, is the last tattered legacy of the Bush-Mark Rey attack on the National Forests.

Pre-Bush versions of the forest-planning rules contained enforceable standards that protected wildlife, water, and forests. The earlier rules also provided opportunities for public involvement and required analysis of environmental impacts of forest plans on the national forests, impacts that result from plan decisions regarding logging levels and other extractive uses of forest resources. Bush and his USDA undersecretary Mark Rey simply threw out the idea of enforceable environmental standards -- the Court was not amused:

[C]ourts have rejected USDA's argument that the programmatic nature of the plan development rule necessarily means that it will have no effect on the environment or protected species. The USDA has simply copied those rejected legal arguments in a new document and called it a 'Biological Assessment.' This is not sufficient to satisfy the [Endangered Species Act]'s requirements....Because the EIS does not evaluate the environmental impacts of the 2008 Rule, it does not comply with [the National Environmental Policy Act]'s requirements.

It will take years to undo all the damage from the past eight years (and some places that we lost will never recover) but we're only five months in to the new administration, and the contrast could not be starker.

Almost, But Not Quite, Mr. President

Washington, D.C. -- President Obama delivered some stellar remarks yesterday after the passage by the House of H.R. 2454, the climate and energy bill championed by Congressmen Waxman and Markey and steered through a narrowly divided House by Speaker Pelosi. President Obama pointed out, most importantly, that the bill is far more than the cap-and trade-system that has received most of the media attention and generated the political heat:

You look at the constituent parts of this bill -- not only a framework for cap and trade, but huge significant steps on energy efficiency, a renewable energy standard, huge incentives for research and development in new technologies, incentives for electric cars, incentives for nuclear energy, clean coal technology. This really is an unprecedented step and a comprehensive approach.

President Obama also focused heavily on the importance of energy reforms designed to encourage a shift to getting far more work out of each BTU of energy that our economy uses and on the number of new jobs that would be created by the combination of investments in new energy, regulatory reform of the energy sector, and capping carbon emissions. The president's emphasis on the importance of combining a cap with investments and regulatory reform was strongly reinforced from an unexpected quarter -- the Business Round Table.

In a massive analysis of proposals to limit carbon dioxide emissions by putting a price on carbon -- whether through a cap or through a tax -- the Roundtable concluded that combining price mechanisms with regulatory reform and investments would enable us to reduce carbon emissions roughly twice as fast at roughly half the cost to the economy. For example, the Roundtable determined that a price mechanism alone would be unable to drive auto fuel economy beyond 32 mpg -- but with policy support for new technology and market reform, we could get over 50 mpg. In the commercial building space, a cap or tax alone would reduce emissions by only perhaps 15 percent -- but with regulatory support at a lower cost we could cut emissions by 35 percent.

And the Roundtable's study confirmed what environmentalists and the president have already been saying -- that policy support is essential if we are going to harvest the potential value of the new economic growth and green jobs that could come with reducing carbon.

The Roundtable study is -- in my view -- thoughtlessly focused on the desirability of opening up the coast to oil and gas. It spends a disproportionate amount of its time on nuclear energy but interestingly concludes that nuclear energy is likely only to maintain its present market share, not grow rapidly. But it provides a very powerful validation for the importance of policy -- as well as price -- in moving us forward to a new energy economy.

This interaction is illustrated by the one part of the president's remarks that I thought missed the boat. Asked by the media about the provision in the bill that would require, after 2020, border-adjustment fees levied on imports of energy-intensive products such as steel if the exporting country had not entered into the global climate-protection agreement, the president fell back on the suggestion that such fees, per se, might be protectionist. He correctly pointed out that the bill contained a number of other mechanisms to help protect against trying to eliminate pollution from industry by exporting the industries. But, long-term, if certain countries want to try to grow their share of the global steel industry by allowing their steel mills to continue emitting carbon pollution, there needs to be a price signal to discourage that behavior -- and the current WTO prohibition against such "process" standards will need to be modified.

Now, this needs to be done in a smart and fair way. The U.S. can't declare that, if Korea or China doesn't go our way on climate, we will simply prohibit the importation of their steel. But if these countries are running dirty steel industries, then trade sanctions seem entirely appropriate, especially once the world has agreed on a set of standards for the steel sector globally -- those standards need to be enforced against all countries. So here again, a price mechanism needs to be combined with appropriate standards and regulations to work.

That's the big challenge as the debate moves to the Senate. The House bill contains some of the right regulatory mechanisms, but it's also missing some important ones. It sets up a price mechanism but then allows too many potential ways around it. It invests in clean energy but also invests too much in keeping dirty technologies going. Getting the three legs of the climate-solutions stool -- new technology, regulatory reform, and carbon limits -- all in place at one time will be tricky, but nothing else will do the job.

Not the End. Not the Beginning of the End. Perhaps the End of the Beginning

San Francisco -- I was sitting in the annual Sierra Club staff awards ceremony, listening to President Allison Chin read the Board of Directors' commendation to Greg Haegele, my deputy, awarding Greg the John Muir award, the Sierra Club's highest honor. Allison was citing Greg's leadership in the Climate Recovery Partnership, the Club's integrated effort to deal with the Climate Crisis, when my cell phone signaled I had a text message -- one that I had been waiting for.

It was from our policy director, Debbie Sease, letting me know that, by the narrowest of margins, 219 to 212, the House of Representatives had just passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill, a critical next step in the success of America's struggle to become part of the solution, not the problem, in solving the climate crisis.

This victory came only after the Club, its allies in the faith community, the hip-hop community, organized labor, business, scientists, and the environmental community pulled out all the stops in an unprecedented mobilization. And it came for a piece of legislation that lays the groundwork -- but does not do the job. A shift of the votes of only four members of the House would have defeated it, and sent us all back to square one.

Depending on how you look at it, that is all either good news or bad news. The bad news is how far America had to go -- and still has to go -- in creating a national dialogue about energy and climate, one that looks to the future and not the past, one that brings us together as a nation in a transformational effort to redefine the meaning of the 21st century. This bill should have been able to be stronger -- the vote should not have been this close -- we should not have had to work this hard.

The good news is that, thanks to leadership by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, and President Obama, we kept on moving -- America did not stall out. And the Sierra Club was a critical part of the chorus of hope that kept this momentum going.

But now we must make this moment signify not just the laying of a cornerstone but the launch of a continuous commitment to the construction of a great Cathedral of the future -- one in which people don't measure their success, or their prosperity, or their power, by the short-sightedness of their vision and the rapidity with which they are spending down their inheritance.

As is always true in the legislative process, there was ugly sausage-making -- and much that was transactional, compromising, and inadequate. But as Winston Churchill said, "You can count on the United States of America to do the right thing -- after exhausting all the alternatives." Perhaps, tonight, we had exhausted all the alternatives.