Oakland, CA -- Back in 2001, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters joined the Bush Administration in advocating drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It was a major blow to the progressive movement. But the most vocal advocate of the move, a Teamster leader in Alaska named Jerry Hood, was ousted by the membership several years ago. And yesterday, in a speech here, Teamster President James P. Hoffa put his union solidly back on the side of the premise that the future of both America's economy and its environment lies in a new, clean economy. Hoffa told union members that more drilling would do nothing to ease pain at the pump, and called instead for an investment in a clean energy economy that will create new jobs.
Hoffa announced that his union no longer supports drilling the Refuge, and went on to make this remarkable statement, referring to the last eight years:
"The environment has paid an even heavier price. Global warming is for real. Air pollution is killing people and making our children sick. And you know what? We share some of the blame. In the past, we were forced to make a false choice. The choice was: Good Jobs or a Clean Environment. We were told no pollution meant no jobs. If we wanted clean air, the economy would suffer and jobs would be sent overseas. Well guess what? We let the big corporations pollute and the jobs went overseas anyway. We didn't enforce environmental regulations and the economy still went in the toilet. The middle class got decimated and the environment is on the brink of disaster. Well I say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! No more false divides. The future, if we are to prosper as a nation, will lie in a green economy...."
Meanwhile, in almost pathetic proof that the Bible is right when it says "as ye sow, so shall ye reap," John McCain had to cancel a planned trip to Louisiana, where he was going to sing the virtues of off-shore oil drilling. McCain's staff tried to pass off the cancellation as all about the weather, but there was more going in the Gulf. A collision between a tanker and a barge had just spilled 419,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil into the Mississippi River, causing a slick approximately 12 miles long that closed a 29-mile stretch of river. The visuals would, shall we say, not have resembled a Ronald Reagan "Morning in America" event.
It's clear that McCain understands that abandoning his long opposition to offshore oil drilling was an act of craven self-abasement designed to put him back in the good graces of the Republican Party's oil wing. He now admits that leasing will have no real impact on the price of gas, but he claims that it's still a good idea because it will have a "psychological" benefit. So having to cancel a trip to avoid giving the national press corps the opportunity to do split screens -- McCain shilling for oil on one side, a ravaged Mississippi on the other -- might in some odd way be a relief, psychologically speaking. But it won't help his campaign.
The reason for this acknowledgment, of course, was not to confess how bad a manager Bush has been but to lower the value the Administration has to use when figuring out where to set health or safety standards --or determining whether it's worthwhile to act to prevent runaway global warming. The less a life is worth, the weaker the safety standards warranted to protect it.
It's not clear whether the EPA really has any scientific basis for this devaluation -- the experts it cited said their data did not support the change. But there is an important back story here. Right after Bush came into office, the Office of Management and Budget, under the leadership of regulatory czar John Graham, lowered the value of life used by the OMB even more drastically -- to $3.7 million. Then Graham tried to lower the value of the life of someone over 50 by arguing that the last few years of life had less value. This rapidly was dubbed "the senior death discount," and prompted then EPA Administrator Christy Todd Whitman to say that the EPA would have nothing to do with Graham's calculus of life's worth and his characterization of death as a money saver.
So EPA had held on to its historic valuation of life (in constant dollars.) But now, in yet another sign that Stephen Johnson is the worst EPA Administrator in history, he has caved in to the White House and started lowering the value attached to the average American. This discounting the value of life -- especially lives saved in the future -- is a central piece to the reactionary prospectus that Dick Cheney brought with him. It turns out, for example, that the biggest difference in how global-warming deniers evaluate the potential effects of global warming is not in their calculations of the physical or social impacts of warming -- those differ, but not by that much. What differs dramatically is how highly they value saving a million lives in a hundred years. Reactionaries attach a low value to each life -- say the current earnings of residents of Africa -- and then discount them by up to 10 percent a year. When you do this, you find that a life in seven years is worth only half as much as one today. In 14 years your child's value is only a quarter of yours today. And in 100 years a human life is worth only 1/100 of a percent of what it is worth today -- using Graham's $3.7 million figure, the value of saving a life in 100 years is a very modest $268. Interestingly, by this calculus the lives of the entire current population of the U.S. are worth only around $81 billion by 2108 -- less than what we spend today on the war in Iraq. Hardly worth saving, wouldn't you say?
Well, you might think that it's worth saving that life, but the people running the country right now do not -- and neither do the people who are advising John McCain.
Washington, DC -- A trillion dollars is the cost former Vice-President Gore attached to his proposed national effort to solve global warming last week. Saying "together we can solve this challenge," Gore laid down a new, bold marker: Shift our economy entirely to carbon-free, renewable electricity in a decade. "To those who say ten years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider what the world's scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don't act in ten years," he said. He attached a trillion dollar price tag -- probably as a means of conveying just how big a job this is -- and in that he is right.
But the price tag is actually a bargain -- because every year we currently spend $700 billion importing oil, and we will shortly hit the trillion-dollar-a-year mark for that one fossil fuel alone. The real challenge isn't that we can't afford a carbon-free economy -- because it's not that big a bill. The awesomely difficult -- perhaps impossible -- challenge will be getting it done in a decade. But the closer we can come, the smaller will be the bill we face for all the things we didn't do back when we had more time -- going all the way back to Rio in 1988.
Are Americans ready? Every day, more and more of them are. In his speech, Gore commented that we needed to move from changing lightbulbs to changing leadership. And on the same night that he spoke, ordinary citizens gathered in more than 300 house parties organized by the Sierra Club as part of our Lightbulbs to Leadership campaign -- it's almost as if the Vice-President had read our action kit.
Detroit -- The housing bubble alone couldn't bring us back to 1929. But the housing bubble combined with the auto-oil catastrophe might. Let's look at the current, measurable toll from our addiction to oil and from the American auto industry's dependence on the past.
We are spending $700 billion a year on importing oil (far more than on the war in Iraq, as T. Boone Pickens reminds us). The last time I counted, American manufacturers had shut down 70 manufacturing and parts plants to shed no-longer-marketable SUVs and light trucks in the last few years. When oil hit $4 a gallon, the issue of what to do with our fleet of SUVs and trucks that no one can afford to drive was already imponderable. This week we learned that 40 million Americans have auto loans larger than the value of their vehicles -- which means they can't afford to trade them in and can't afford to drive them. September will be grim.
GM is worth almost nothing on the stock market, and those who invested in it have been wiped out -- as have those who dedicated their lives to working for it. Last week the Sunday Business section of the New York Times laid out in seemingly gory detail the sordid history of how American auto companies fell behind and failed to see high oil prices coming. The story nailed the reality that Detroit failed to learn how to produce different models of cars on one assembly line, which would have enabled it to respond to changing oil prices and consumer demand.
The story also lamented how Washington, by failing to improve fuel economy rules, was complicit in Detroit's failure. We have voices such as retiring New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici saying, "Much of what we're seeing today could have been prevented or ameliorated had we chosen to act differently. It was a bipartisan failure to act." Even Chevron CEO David J. O'Reilly told Larry King, "If we want to solve this problem of high energy prices, we're going to have to work not only in the demand side, as Congress has done with [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standards and alternatives, but we're going to have to work on the supply as well."
So now we're all in favor of using technology to get us farther on a mile of gas, right?
And the problem was just one of those inexplicable failures to see the future, yes?
Well, not quite.
First, we are not all on board yet. In fact, the Bush Administration is busy setting fuel economy standards on the assumption that oil will cost not $5 gallon, not $4.50 a gallon, much less the $8/gallon some are talking about. No, in the fading months of this Administration, they are looking through a rear-view mirror and assuming that oil in 2015 will cost $2.45 a gallon. This is not an abstract concern. If the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration assumes a future gas cost of even $3.40 a gallon, the average car in 2015 will be required to get 13 percent more miles on a gallon of gas. But we're still acting as if gas will be cheap tomorrow -- when we know better -- and the result will be that America wastes more gas and ships more money and jobs to the Persian Gulf.
Nor was this one of those "I just didn't get it" problems. During the Clinton years, Dan Becker (the Sierra Club's auto strategist) and I made annual pilgrimages to Detroit to sound the warning. "Forget global warming," we said. "Your business model can't survive. You make money by relying on outrageous markups on trucks and SUVs built with old technology. They waste gas and handle badly. Eventually Stuttgart and Tokyo will take over those markets as well by building assembly plants inside the tarrif wall that protects you today."
Whether we were talking to Ford, or GM, or the UAW, they would always agree that the auto industry needed to change. I remember one day sitting with Steve Yokich, then the president of the UAW, and making this point. Yokich took me to the window of Solidarity House, the union's headquarters, and asked me to look out at the parking lot and comment on what I saw. "Well," I said obviously, "they're all American made." "Of course," he said. "But there are almost no SUVs. Car guys don't drive crap." But then he told me that the companies would have to lead the change -- the union couldn't.
And the companies? Well, they got the timing wrong. Oil hit $4 a gallon far sooner than they had calculated. But why didn't they modernize? That was hard to understand, until one day when a senior VP for GM told me, "We can never make money producing sedans in the U.S. This needs to become a truck-only manufacturing platform for us. We'll make cars -- in China and Mexico." The industry thought it had ten more years of maintaining a share of the U.S. market with trucks and SUVs. It got caught napping. But it had never planned, once it woke up, to modernize its American manufacturing base. The plan was always to go south or west, as Ford has just done by putting its new Fiesta plant in Mexico -- where wages, instead of rising to U.S. standards, are slumping to Chinese levels.
Can we get out of this? Not painlessly. But because our vehicle fleet is so inefficient and because we use so much of the world's oil (25 percent), we have a shot. But we need to act like this is an emergency. We need to set fuel-economy standards based on realistic future estimates of the cost of gas -- $5, $6 a gallon. We need to give consumers a choice at the service station -- gasoline, diesel, ethanol, CNG -- so that Detroit and Tokyo can start offering options.
The oil monopoly hasn't served us well -- let's break it. We need major investments in plug-in hybrids and in wind and sun to produce the electricity those vehicles will need -- or to free up natural gas for auto use, as T. Boone Pickens has suggested. We need to start giving mass transit operators the money they need to meet the demand that has been created. Could we conceivably build a high-speed train or two in the U.S.? And if we had smart growth planning, our cities would need 20 percent less driving.
The solutions are out there. We just have to let go of the past and grab them.
And I promise -- we won't like the results if, once again, we let politics as usual stand in the way.
Normally outsiders have a hard time grasping the technical issues at Yucca, but this latest recklessness is simplicity itself. Yucca lies near earthquake faults and is expected to experience quakes of up to 6.5 on the Richter scale. DOE rejected Holtec's proposal that the nuclear waste casks undergoing the four-year "cool down" period before being storied permanently should be tied down with seismic anchors. Now in San Francisco, where I live, gargoyles on office building are seismically anchored. It seems abundantly clear that nuclear waste casks should be as well. But DOE wants to save money and, as Holtec said, in an earthquake "pigs will fly before the casks will stay put." Again, this is not the opinion of Greenpeace -- it's a company that stores nuclear waste as a business.
So how does this play out politically? Nevada is a Presidential battleground state, and has a closely contested Congressional seat as well.
Sixty percent of Nevadans continue to oppose Yucca. More than half say that a Presidential candidate's stance on Yucca will influence their vote in November. John McCain supports Yucca. Barack Obama opposes it. More troubling for Nevadans, McCain favors an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in constructing at least 45 new nuclear power plants, and perhaps as many as 145. These new plants if built will need storage -- and Yucca, as presently designed, will be full. But the pressure will be enormous to just ship the added waste to Nevada, on the grounds that it is already at risk.
As Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid put it during McCain's most recent visit to Las Vegas, McCain "believes Nevada is a wasteland."
Commissioner Reid also drew a sharp contrast between the two candidates: “While Sen. McCain wants to bury the most toxic substance known to man in our state, Sen. Obama wants to spend billions of dollars to invest in new technologies that will create 5 million new jobs across the country.”
McCain's response to Nevada was scornful. From the seemingly safe distance of California, he rejected the notion that there could be anything wrong with the Yucca site, saying “It’s not a technological breakthrough that needs to be taken; it’s a NIMBY problem.” However, it appears that NIMBY is a relative concept, depending on whose backyard we're talking about. Because when asked earlier what he thought about the safety of just shipping radioactive waste through Arizona to get to Yucca, McCain, as this YouTube clip shows, made it clear he didn't like the idea at all.
But about a half million Nevadans have moved into the state since DOE last seriously tried to move the Yucca Mountain project along. Our challenge is going to be educating those new residents about the federal plan to use junk science and rushed permits to make their state the designated sacrifice zone to revive the financial fortunes of America's nuclear power complex.
Las Vegas -- That the core message of the advertising blitz that T. Boone Pickens announced yesterday in New York. Here's the ad itself. The ad buy will be huge -- $58 million -- and by the time I got here last night, people had already seen it on TV. Some of the media coverage of the Pickens plan has simply emphasized his move into wind, while some coverage has focused on his vision of using wind power to back out natural gas currently used for power, and then using the gas to replace imported oil. Overall, though, the coverage has been intense and overwhelmingly positive.
Pickens says that while oil prices may decline from their current level, they won't go below $100 a barrel -- which makes the idea of driving vehicles fueled by compressed natural gas, currently priced at the equivalent of about $2 a gallon, very attractive if the supply can be generated without spiking the price of natural gas. But since half of the gas we currently burn to heat and cool our houses is wasted, and since U.S. gas reserves and production are both increasing, the gas supply picture looks a good deal brighter than that for oil. And it's cleaner.
Although most of the coverage has been extensive, there is one remarkable exception. Fox News ran only a brief eight-line story that completely buried the Pickens plan and instead featured his prediction about the future price of oil. This is interesting because, in an earlier Fox interview with Pickens, they carefully edited out all of his views on the reality that we can't make a meaningful difference in our situation by more domestic drilling. If you watch only Fox News, you'll never know what the ex-oilman is really saying: That oil isn't the answer.
Madison, WI -- While the Republican leadership in Congress continues to block any real federal action on a new energy future -- refusing yet again to allow renewable energy tax credits to be extended -- the states continue to move. Wisconsin is the latest huge success story. Late last week, a 29-member task force appointed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle to make recommendations for slashing greenhouse-gas emissions overwhelmingly adopted a final package. Voting "yes" were the state's electrical utilities, IBEW, United Steelworkers, SC Johnson, Johnson Controls, legislators from both parties, the dairy industry, the Sierra Club, and other environmentalists.
General Motors, the paper industry, and small-engine manufacturers voted "no" -- but were totally isolated.
Highlights of the package are reducing electricity use by 2 percent a year and natural gas by 1 percent through high-performance efficiency investments and incentives; new building codes and lighting standards; 25 percent renewable electricity by 2025; California's clean car standards; and a 75 percent reduction in the state's CO2 emissions by 2050.
Florida, meanwhile, concerned about its heavy dependence on tourism, announced that it was going to demand a solution to the global-warming problem posed by airplanes. Governor Crist declared that the state will work with the Alliance for Sustainable Air Transportation to develop "green aviation" standards and practices. Utah, one of the most conservative states, came out and pledged to bring its total CO2 emissions down to 2005 levels by 2020 -- modest, not good enough -- but, hey, it's Utah.
And the California Air Resources Board came out with a stunningly good proposal to implement the state's greenhouse gas legislation, AB 32. "Today’s draft has the potential to be the premier greenhouse gas reduction effort in the country, with a 33 percent clean-energy standard to drive innovation, energy efficiency measures to keep dollars at home, and clean-vehicle requirements to reduce toxic air pollution," was how Sierra Club California's Bill Magavern summed it up.
And Hawaii's governor signed into law a bill requiring developers to install water heaters that use the islands' plentiful sun rather than expensive and imported oil.
Santa Rosa, CA -- Almost $5 a gallon -- that's what I paid for gas here Sunday on my way to an environmental awards event hosted by Representative Mike Thompson. That's some of the most expensive gasoline in American history. And this district, on the north coast of California, is the place chosen by Dick Cheney, George Bush, John McCain, and the oil industry as the Potemkin village for solving the problem -- just drill the coast!
But the 300 or so of Thompson's constituents at the event are a profile in why this ploy by Big Oil and its political henchmen won't work. People here travel long distances, on modest salaries -- but they are thinking about how to save their watersheds, get bond acts passed for mass transit, and encourage recycling. They're gritty in their opposition to oil drilling but no longer panicked -- they've watched Big Oil go after the shoreline that is their heart and soul ever since James Watt first targeted this coast in 1981. They are confident that with Thompson's support they will ride this moment out as well.
That's good old American common sense -- something that appears to be in short supply in Washington this week. For example, here's the official Bush Administration view, courtesy of the Department of Energy: Drilling America's coasts would produce no new oil until 2030, and even then it would lower the price of gas by only 3.5 cents gallon. So why is this happening now? With only a few months left for the Bush Administration, Big Oil's hammering down on GOP politicians. The chits are being called in. Mavericks are getting branded.
Political correctness comes to the Straight Talking Express. Newsweek's reaction was stunning: "Contradictions and misstatements short-circuit McCain's energy policy pronouncements." A new poll of young Americans shows that McCain's negatives have jumped percentage points in the past two months. In April, according to the Democracy Corps' polling, McCain's favorable/unfavorable ratings were 34 percent and 37 percent. They're now 30 percent and 49 percent.
Yet all the Republicans can talk about are poll numbers showing that, if you ask them in the right way, more Americans say they're in favor offshore drilling than oppose it. Senator John Ensign touted the strategy this way: "Energy is actually a huge opportunity for Republicans. Energy has the opportunity to change the climate if it's done right." But those in favor gave this answer only when reassured that such drilling will be environmentally benign -- and they are even more in favor of solutions such as more-efficient cars and green electricity. For them, they are just giving an answer to a pollster.
But the opponents of offshore oil drilling, like Mike Thompson's constituents, have a deep commitment to the places they love, the places where they live. This is everything for them. Sadly, Senator McCain has foolishly gone with the pollsters and abandoned the people. His choice will resonate in this district -- and in many others in states like Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Oregon come November. We need to get to a place where serious politicians can't get away with stuff like this -- where the explanation "I really didn't mean it -- that was just politics" is the kiss of death; not a "get out of jail free" card.
If the Republicans think they can ride the current poll numbers on drilling for oil to victory in November, I have a bridge to sell them. It's the same one Ted Stevens tried to build with billions in public money in Alaska -- the Bridge to Nowhere.
Cleveland, OH -- Not since the Sierra Club's first-ever Presidential endorsement, of Walter Mondale back in 1984, has a Club Presidential endorsement gotten the kind of media attention that our endorsement of Barack Obama received on Friday. Perhaps it was the unusual joint announcement with Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers and Allison Chin, President of the Sierra Club. Perhaps it was the centrality of our message -- that a new energy future is the key to our economy, our environment, and our security -- to this year's Presidential dialogue. Perhaps it was the fact that Senator John McCain, who had been sitting on the fence on environmental issues all year, picked last week to fall off -- firmly inside George Bush's Big Oil corral.
But the audience understood that Obama gets it -- that if Obama were in the White House there wouldn't be any doubt that we would be pushing wind, solar, and a host of new energy technologies to the forefront, instead of extending bloated subsidies to oil and nuclear -- that Obama believes that green jobs are the American future.
Senator Sherrod Brown was there, one of the people in the U.S. Senate who gets it best -- and the Ohio that two years ago sent Brown to the Senate and elected Ted Strickland as Governor, is poised to make Barack Obama our next President, and the first green leader of the 21st century.
Washington, DC -- A week ago, John McCain was still a "maverick" -- a longhorn that no rancher owns because it hasn't been branded. Yesterday, he got lassoed by Big Oil, and today he was branded by the President with a big "W". (Since this is a family blog, we won't talk about the rest of what happens to a young steer when he gets the lariat around his feet at a roundup.)
McCain changed his tune yesterday, coming out for offshore oil drilling and against protecting our coasts. (In my blog yesterday, I inadvertently said "Cheney," which alert readers caught -- it was McCain who flip-flopped yesterday.) McCain then went on to try to create daylight between himself and the President, insisting that he has a very different approach to global warming and energy. But the big news in his speech was the cave-in to Big Oil on the coasts -- and today Bush made it abundantly clear that McCain has joined his camp by ratifying what both Cheney and McCain said in the past two days -- it's time to give the oil industry what it wants.
All of this, of course, will do nothing about the price of gas. By the time the outer continental shelf could be leased and brought into production, the whole world supply and demand picture will have been transformed for either better or worse -- and a few drops from fouling the beaches of Florida won't matter a tinker's damn. But we're not helpless. For one thing the oil industry has lots of leases it hasn't developed -- roughly 70 percent of its holdings in fact are not in production off the coast. More importantly, Americans have changed the cars they buy -- dramatically.
Sedans are taking the place of SUVs and pickups. That means that Americans are already starting to save dollars -- and gas. Because when someone buys a fuel-efficient vehicle instead of a gas hog, they save money two ways. They use less gas immediately -- a lot less. And they lower demand over time as the vehicle fleet becomes more efficient -- so the price goes down as well. It's a virtuous cycle, a very fast one taking only a few years, and it's already happening. Too bad Detroit and Bush didn't start it five years ago. Gasoline wouldn't be $4/gallon. And half of us would be driving fuel-sipping, not gas-guzzling, vehicles.
