It's closer than you may think and is mostly a matter of connecting all the pieces
John Brandon
May 15, 2009 (Computerworld) Science fiction writers call it Utopia, the glorious City of the Future. But short of downtown atriums being guarded by invisible walls and flying cars, City 2.0 is not as far off as you may think.
Ubiquitous wireless networks are already available in cities including Baltimore and Minneapolis, corporations such as Thomson Reuters have sustainable data centers that sell power back to the local utility, the smart energy grid is well on its way, and city-provided social networks are common. Indeed, the next steps toward the city of tomorrow are all about integrating these services cohesively, making them widely available across the entire metropolis and managing the services more efficiently.
"The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem," says Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst with Enderle Group based in San Jose, Calif.
While the concept of City 2.0 is monumental, these key technology advancements are already helping pave the road to the next-generation city.
Smart grid
The smart use of energy is one of the most important goals for urban centers today. The smart grid concept centers around the idea of using electricity when it's available cheaply, rather than at peak times when it's more expensive, and allows wind and solar and other renewable sources to be integrated into the energy grid. This requires two-way communication between utility companies and the businesses and individuals who use their power. We're nowhere near a comprehensive smart grid yet, but some cities and energy companies are taking steps in that direction.
Today, a few cities, such as Boulder, Colo. and Houston, have pilot programs where customers can visit a Web site to see their real-time energy usage. Google is currently testing a PowerMeter project so employees can see not only how much energy they're using, but when and for what. EnerNOC, a provider of IP-based sensors and monitoring, is giving financial incentives to customers and utility companies that adjust supply and demand according to real-time data.
A good example of smart grid technology in action is at the Des Moines, Iowa state capitol grounds, where city officials have set up a smart grid that feeds to a central kiosk. It shows the power usage for each building in the capitol complex. To create the smart grid, the capitol buildings were wired with sensors that connect a fiber backbone, feed through a central server and then report usage data in real time to the kiosk.
"Today, departments have no incentive to save power from a government perspective," says State CIO John Gillispie. "We are working toward billing the individual departments for how much they use."
Gillispie is already planning on adding sensors for floor-level power monitoring, and envisions a day when sensors are added across the state and in multiple cities -- even on roadways and in cars, office buildings, schools and homes.
City-centric social networking
We're all familiar by now with using public social networks to catch up with friends and family or even to find a job, but wouldn't it be nice if your city had a social network where you could keep abreast of local developments and weigh in on neighborhood issues?
In Dublin, Ohio, the city operates a Novell Teaming portal where government officials can run blogs, chat over instant messaging and share documents. In the next few months, the city plans to make the private network available to all citizens. In a future city scenario, a social network like this could allow residents to submit ideas for city improvements, chat with politicians and blog about their neighborhood over a secure and city-centric portal that caters to their local needs.
San Jose, Calif., is one of the most high-tech cities in the U.S. Over the next few years, the city will create a social network on Wikiplanning that helps citizens learn about the city, chat over instant messaging, complete surveys and download city podcasts.
"Frequently, only small groups of residents come to public meetings, and in the case of a multiple meeting project, it's largely the same group of citizens who continue to participate," says Kim Walesh, San Jose's chief strategist. "Participation by small groups may not offer a good representation of the community as a whole. An advantage of Wikiplanning is that activities can be done day or night at the user's convenience, allowing for far greater participation by people in the workforce."
WiMax and citywide wireless
The concept of readily available wireless service has been around the block a few times, so to speak. Cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago have tried to provide Wi-Fi access without too much success. Minneapolis is one of the few large cities that have deployed Wi-Fi successfully.
City WiMax
In Portland, a Wi-Fi network didn't fare so well either, but a WiMax project seems to be off to a much stronger start.
WiMax, widely seen as the next generation of mobile data access after Wi-Fi, stalled over the past few years due to the complexity of the technology, changes in partnerships and reluctance on the part of city officials to adopt an emerging technology. Even so, WiMax promises more ubiquitous access than Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi hot spots require users to seek them out but WiMax is available throughout a given area. WiMax requires fewer base stations across the metropolis, at a lower infrastructure cost, using licensed spectrum that does not interfere with other wireless LANs.
Tim Sweeney, a product manager at Intel, says the prospects of WiMax for cities are high because it means greater bandwidth for city services.
"Wi-Fi was never intended to support a wide area; it is really for inside buildings," he says. Sweeney gave a future city scenario where cars report their fuel tank levels over WiMax, gas stations bid on the cost of fuel, and an electric car communicates with a smart grid about its energy usage -- whether an alternative route would save on power used.
Sustainable data center
Sustainability is a key part of future cities. The idea is that a highly efficient, well-monitored and "green" data center could allow a city to realize major energy-savings benefits. It would also lead to being able to use data centers for most city services, not just for computing. For example, a single city data center could provide services for government and monitor automobile traffic in city streets. Today, these functions are wildly disparate and difficult to consolidate.
According to Enderle, most city services are not connected to each other today, but some individual components such as electrical usage in government buildings already have the sensors required for monitoring city services. At some point in the next 10 years, cities will need to decide when patching an aging infrastructure no longer makes sense and will instead start using more modern technology, Enderle says. In a sustainable data center model, city services could be part of a vast "network of networks" that monitors real-time power, water, wireless and data usage for all citizens.
One example of how this sustainability could be tied to city services is at Thomson Reuters, a news and information gathering service that operates 100,000 square feet of multiple data centers for its Westlaw division in Eagan, Minn. Rick King, the global head of technology and operations, has designed operations with close ties to the local Dakota Electric utility.
Data center batteries
The company has about 900 batteries in one data center and four diesel generators in another, which it uses as a backup for power delivered by the local utility. The company also has two massive diesel fuel tanks. Today, the company uses the batteries for short bursts (about 15 minutes) of backup power and can use its generators for a day or two as needed, allowing the local utility to sell the unused power.
Enterprise IT today serves as an excellent example of how future cities could operate. Thomson Reuters monitors 15,000 IT assets such as servers and storage arrays in real time in a central operations center, and the power usage is controlled automatically -- when the diesel generators are needed, they start up on their own. Extending this model to a city could mean that power companies are highly connected, and home owners could even see their own usage at the individual appliance level to be able to adjust usage patterns, tying back into the notion of the previously mentioned smart grid.
How the cloud ties it all together
It's easy to see how the cloud could contribute to future cities. There might be a central command center for monitoring and adjusting power usage and for providing IT services over WiMax, but the actual IT operation could be "in the cloud" and abstracted from a physical data center.
Yankee Group calls this the Anywhere initiative, which is partly about making mobility in a city infrastructure more flexible, efficient and scalable. In this model, anything can be an end point, including portable gadgets, your vehicle, an office building and your home.
Jeffrey Breen, chief technology officer at the Yankee Group, says that the IP-based, packet-switched cloud model in the enterprise can apply to city infrastructure -- that is, as a vast, interconnected smart grid and social network with widespread and reliable wireless access. Mobile citizens would be a click away from city services.
"One way or another, we will get to the point in cities where anyone who wants high-speed access will get it -- and the city won't have to worry about the details of how," says Breen.
A highly connected city with smart grids, widely available wireless access and a sustainable data center is well within reach. Over the next 20 years, cities in the U.S. and abroad will likely take these and other steps toward the goal, building the infrastructure with a view towards better connectivity and better living.
John Brandon is a veteran of the computing industry, having worked as an IT manager for ten years and a tech journalist for another ten. He has written over 2,000 feature articles. He is a regular contributor to Computerworld.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Climate Change: Garbage Gets Fresh Look as Source of Energy
Jeffrey Ball – Wall Street Journal
May 15, 2009
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- Times change, and yesterday's environmental problem starts to look like today's solution. That is what is happening with trash.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has shut down hundreds of pollution-spewing waste incinerators on the belief that burning detritus was a bigger environmental sin than burying it. Today, most American garbage is sent to landfills, some spanning hundreds of acres miles from the cities that generate the refuse. New York City, which tosses about eight million tons of nonindustrial trash each year, trucks much of it to big landfills in states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Landfills have been convenient. But they are falling out of favor as improved technology and changing environmental priorities start to upend the old thinking about garbage.
Past orthodoxy held that burning trash was bad because it spewed toxic substances into the air. In an era when the big environmental threat was localized pollution like smog and cancer-causing plumes, landfills seemed the lesser evil.
Dirty air is still a concern, but now it has been eclipsed by fears of global climate change. In that calculus of environmental harm, recent research suggests, burning trash is better than burying it.
The appeal of most modern incinerators is that they don't only torch trash. They also use the heat from the incineration to boil water, which creates steam, which in turn generates electricity. Yet trash incineration produces just 0.4% of the country's electricity. Even if all U.S. garbage were burned, it wouldn't produce anywhere near enough power to meet the country's energy needs. But as concern about climate change grows, any renewable source of energy -- even a pile of garbage -- seems appealing.
Landfills, too, produce potential fuel -- in the form of methane, which can be captured and used to generate electricity. But a recent study by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers said that most landfills fail to capture all of their methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The study concluded that incinerating a ton of trash emits at least 35% less greenhouse gas and yields 10 times as much electricity as burying it.
Old incinerators were infamous polluters. They coughed out large quantities of soot, the components of acid rain and carcinogenic dioxins.
John Waffenschmidt, a 53-year-old New Yorker who is a vice president for Covanta Energy Corp., the country's biggest owner of waste-to-energy plants, recalls delivering newspapers as a boy in the city in the 1960s. "I'd go out in the morning and there would be little flakes coming down," he says, "because there were 4,000 or 5,000 apartment-building incinerators."
The energy crisis of the late 1970s prompted a push for plants that burned trash to make electricity. Today, 87 waste-to-energy plants are operating in the U.S., with the biggest clusters in Florida, New York and Minnesota.
Some 13% of U.S. garbage is burned -- far less than the 54% buried in landfills and the 33% that is recycled. The modern plants turn prodigious piles of trash into ash yet often sit in the middle of heavily populated areas. New York's Long Island has four incinerators, one of the densest concentrations in the country. Its biggest, a Covanta plant in the town of Hempstead, burns 950,000 tons of garbage a year, right next door to a strip mall. Its 39-story steam tower is the tallest structure on Long Island.
Trucks carrying trash from Long Island and New York City roll into a cavernous room in the plant at a rate of about one every five minutes. The trash is pushed into another room, the "pit," where a crane operator tosses it around with a nine-ton steel claw. He is "fluffing" the rubbish -- mixing in air to help it burn.
After being fluffed, the trash moves by conveyor belt into furnaces, where it is incinerated at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creating the heat that is used to generate electricity.
Today's incinerators are markedly cleaner than their predecessors, yet they still pollute. "One percent of a very toxic substance is still a very toxic substance," says Marchant Wentworth, a renewable-energy campaigner with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
Trash disposal of any sort is problematic. Ideally, society would produce less trash. Recycling is the next-best option.
In Congress and in many state capitals, lawmakers are considering whether to endorse trash incineration as a "renewable" source of power. A green imprimatur would be a boon to the trash-burning industry, which is lobbying feverishly for the move.
Covanta's Hempstead, N.Y., incinerator is applying for permission to expand and burn more trash. Meanwhile, Long Island's main highways, like the roads leading out of New York City, are filled with trucks ferrying the rest of the area's garbage to landfills in other states.
May 15, 2009
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- Times change, and yesterday's environmental problem starts to look like today's solution. That is what is happening with trash.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has shut down hundreds of pollution-spewing waste incinerators on the belief that burning detritus was a bigger environmental sin than burying it. Today, most American garbage is sent to landfills, some spanning hundreds of acres miles from the cities that generate the refuse. New York City, which tosses about eight million tons of nonindustrial trash each year, trucks much of it to big landfills in states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Landfills have been convenient. But they are falling out of favor as improved technology and changing environmental priorities start to upend the old thinking about garbage.
Past orthodoxy held that burning trash was bad because it spewed toxic substances into the air. In an era when the big environmental threat was localized pollution like smog and cancer-causing plumes, landfills seemed the lesser evil.
Dirty air is still a concern, but now it has been eclipsed by fears of global climate change. In that calculus of environmental harm, recent research suggests, burning trash is better than burying it.
The appeal of most modern incinerators is that they don't only torch trash. They also use the heat from the incineration to boil water, which creates steam, which in turn generates electricity. Yet trash incineration produces just 0.4% of the country's electricity. Even if all U.S. garbage were burned, it wouldn't produce anywhere near enough power to meet the country's energy needs. But as concern about climate change grows, any renewable source of energy -- even a pile of garbage -- seems appealing.
Landfills, too, produce potential fuel -- in the form of methane, which can be captured and used to generate electricity. But a recent study by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers said that most landfills fail to capture all of their methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The study concluded that incinerating a ton of trash emits at least 35% less greenhouse gas and yields 10 times as much electricity as burying it.
Old incinerators were infamous polluters. They coughed out large quantities of soot, the components of acid rain and carcinogenic dioxins.
John Waffenschmidt, a 53-year-old New Yorker who is a vice president for Covanta Energy Corp., the country's biggest owner of waste-to-energy plants, recalls delivering newspapers as a boy in the city in the 1960s. "I'd go out in the morning and there would be little flakes coming down," he says, "because there were 4,000 or 5,000 apartment-building incinerators."
The energy crisis of the late 1970s prompted a push for plants that burned trash to make electricity. Today, 87 waste-to-energy plants are operating in the U.S., with the biggest clusters in Florida, New York and Minnesota.
Some 13% of U.S. garbage is burned -- far less than the 54% buried in landfills and the 33% that is recycled. The modern plants turn prodigious piles of trash into ash yet often sit in the middle of heavily populated areas. New York's Long Island has four incinerators, one of the densest concentrations in the country. Its biggest, a Covanta plant in the town of Hempstead, burns 950,000 tons of garbage a year, right next door to a strip mall. Its 39-story steam tower is the tallest structure on Long Island.
Trucks carrying trash from Long Island and New York City roll into a cavernous room in the plant at a rate of about one every five minutes. The trash is pushed into another room, the "pit," where a crane operator tosses it around with a nine-ton steel claw. He is "fluffing" the rubbish -- mixing in air to help it burn.
After being fluffed, the trash moves by conveyor belt into furnaces, where it is incinerated at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creating the heat that is used to generate electricity.
Today's incinerators are markedly cleaner than their predecessors, yet they still pollute. "One percent of a very toxic substance is still a very toxic substance," says Marchant Wentworth, a renewable-energy campaigner with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
Trash disposal of any sort is problematic. Ideally, society would produce less trash. Recycling is the next-best option.
In Congress and in many state capitals, lawmakers are considering whether to endorse trash incineration as a "renewable" source of power. A green imprimatur would be a boon to the trash-burning industry, which is lobbying feverishly for the move.
Covanta's Hempstead, N.Y., incinerator is applying for permission to expand and burn more trash. Meanwhile, Long Island's main highways, like the roads leading out of New York City, are filled with trucks ferrying the rest of the area's garbage to landfills in other states.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Making farmers cool again (Michael Pollan talk)
by Kevin Kelly
Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”
The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick.
Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be “resolarized.” Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we are eating oil.” Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens.
Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system.
How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you.
The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable.
Make farms and farmers cool again.
-Kevin Kelly
Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”
The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick.
Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be “resolarized.” Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we are eating oil.” Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens.
Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system.
How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you.
The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable.
Make farms and farmers cool again.
-Kevin Kelly
Friday, May 1, 2009
Waxman, Markey Still Searching for Votes
Ian Talley and Stephen Power – Wall Street Journal
May 1, 2009
House Democratic leaders appeared to still be short of the votes needed to pass climate-change legislation out of a key subcommittee, but a spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers leading the talks said negotiations were continuing.
Several moderate Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment said Thursday that fundamental issues such as how to soften the impact of the legislation on constituents and industries in their regions are still unresolved and that the panel might not be ready to vote on the measure by next week as Democratic leaders have called for.
The qualms expressed over legislation sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Waxman (D., Calif.), and Edward Markey (D., Mass.) along with possible Republican obstruction, point to the difficulty Democrats are having in finding consensus on climate and energy issues.
“I don’t think the votes are there in the subcommittee,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.) said in an interview. Mr. Butterfield said he was particularly concerned about the bill’s impact on low-income Americans, adding “What do I tell a single mom making eight dollars an hour?”
The legislation sponsored by Messrs Waxman and Markey calls for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and by roughly 80% below 2005 levels by 2050. Earlier this week, Mr. Markey, who leads the energy and environment subcommittee, postponed a planned vote on the measure after having difficulty trying to forge consensus on who should bear the burden for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Waxman said “we are encouraged by the progress that we are making, and the Committee will continue meeting with members to discuss the legislation.”
Mr. Waxman has said he wants the full committee to pass climate legislation by Memorial Day. Despite several days of talks with him and Mr. Markey this week, some moderate Democrats on the subcommittee said Thursday that there was still no agreement between them and Messrs. Waxman on Markey on how to resolve some of their concerns about the measure.
“As I speak, I don’t know if (Markey and Waxman) are agreeable to some of the language that I would like,” Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D., Texas) said in an interview. Mr. Gonzalez said he is pressing Messrs. Waxman and Markey to amend the bill to include greater incentives for nuclear power and to give electric utilities a free allocation of the emission permits that companies would be required to hold under the bill.
“If the language is not in there, I think it’s going to be hard to pull off at the mark up,” Mr. Gonzalez said, either because there won’t be the support from moderate Democrats or because Republicans may try to block the measure.
The legislation before the House panel would institute a cap-and-trade-system, in which the government would set an overall cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and companies would have to buy and sell the right to emit gases such as carbon dioxide. Over time, the cap would become more stringent, and fewer permits would be issued by the government, bringing emissions down. But the bill is largely silent on who will bear the costs of the legislation. It does not specify, for example, the degree to which industries will have to pay for emissions permits, and how revenue raised from selling those permits at government auctions would be used.
Lawmakers from regions heavily reliant on the coal industry, fossil-fuel generation and energy-intensive industries want the government to give out the emission credits to those sectors for free to soften the fiscal impact.
“I can’t vote for a bill unless my refineries (are protected) because of the nature of my district, it’s a job base and a tax base,” Rep. Gene Green (D., Texas), another moderate member of the panel, said in an interview. “Frankly it’s a national security issue, I don’t want to transfer production offshore for refined products, relying on imports from the Middle East and Venezuela.”
May 1, 2009
House Democratic leaders appeared to still be short of the votes needed to pass climate-change legislation out of a key subcommittee, but a spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers leading the talks said negotiations were continuing.
Several moderate Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment said Thursday that fundamental issues such as how to soften the impact of the legislation on constituents and industries in their regions are still unresolved and that the panel might not be ready to vote on the measure by next week as Democratic leaders have called for.
The qualms expressed over legislation sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Waxman (D., Calif.), and Edward Markey (D., Mass.) along with possible Republican obstruction, point to the difficulty Democrats are having in finding consensus on climate and energy issues.
“I don’t think the votes are there in the subcommittee,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.) said in an interview. Mr. Butterfield said he was particularly concerned about the bill’s impact on low-income Americans, adding “What do I tell a single mom making eight dollars an hour?”
The legislation sponsored by Messrs Waxman and Markey calls for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and by roughly 80% below 2005 levels by 2050. Earlier this week, Mr. Markey, who leads the energy and environment subcommittee, postponed a planned vote on the measure after having difficulty trying to forge consensus on who should bear the burden for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Waxman said “we are encouraged by the progress that we are making, and the Committee will continue meeting with members to discuss the legislation.”
Mr. Waxman has said he wants the full committee to pass climate legislation by Memorial Day. Despite several days of talks with him and Mr. Markey this week, some moderate Democrats on the subcommittee said Thursday that there was still no agreement between them and Messrs. Waxman on Markey on how to resolve some of their concerns about the measure.
“As I speak, I don’t know if (Markey and Waxman) are agreeable to some of the language that I would like,” Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D., Texas) said in an interview. Mr. Gonzalez said he is pressing Messrs. Waxman and Markey to amend the bill to include greater incentives for nuclear power and to give electric utilities a free allocation of the emission permits that companies would be required to hold under the bill.
“If the language is not in there, I think it’s going to be hard to pull off at the mark up,” Mr. Gonzalez said, either because there won’t be the support from moderate Democrats or because Republicans may try to block the measure.
The legislation before the House panel would institute a cap-and-trade-system, in which the government would set an overall cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and companies would have to buy and sell the right to emit gases such as carbon dioxide. Over time, the cap would become more stringent, and fewer permits would be issued by the government, bringing emissions down. But the bill is largely silent on who will bear the costs of the legislation. It does not specify, for example, the degree to which industries will have to pay for emissions permits, and how revenue raised from selling those permits at government auctions would be used.
Lawmakers from regions heavily reliant on the coal industry, fossil-fuel generation and energy-intensive industries want the government to give out the emission credits to those sectors for free to soften the fiscal impact.
“I can’t vote for a bill unless my refineries (are protected) because of the nature of my district, it’s a job base and a tax base,” Rep. Gene Green (D., Texas), another moderate member of the panel, said in an interview. “Frankly it’s a national security issue, I don’t want to transfer production offshore for refined products, relying on imports from the Middle East and Venezuela.”
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