Daily Score Blog

John Wihbey at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media provides a reality check about how poll questions about drilling have been framed. For example, he points out (quoting Wall Street Journal energy reporter and blogger Keith Johnson), that when poll questions offer a choice between drilling and more investment in alternative energy, alternative energy usually comes out ahead. But lots of polls don't give respondents the range of options.

Over the weekend, a good column by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times about Denmark's success in insulating itself from high prices. I won't try to reprise it here, but just want to highlight a critically important point:

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

Friedman doesn't mention this, but Rasmussen heads a right-of-center coalition government. He's not a lefty; he's a fiscal conservative who is using a tax-shifting technique to continue a long-term strategy of making Denmark one of the most energy efficient economies on earth. As a consequence, skyrocketing energy prices are annoying to Denmark's economy, but they aren't devastating.

The problem, of course, is that to follow Denmark's lead, we North Americans will have to get over our congenital aversion to higher energy prices.

After reading Friedman's column, I turned on the Olympics last night. During the commercial breaks I was treated to ads from both Washington's governor and her challenger -- each accusing the other of "raising the gas tax" as if this were the worst imagineable sin. Unless I'm mistaken, that big scary tax hike was the recent "nickel tax," equal to a whopping 1.3% of the current retail price of gasoline.

Sigh.

This is the seventh in a short series of posts that explain some important but often overlooked policy issues in the Western Climate Initiative -- the West's regional cap-and-trade system.

Earlier in this series, I've worried that WCI is waiting too long to include some major sources of climate pollution in their program. But worse, they are also proposing to completely ignore some sources of emissions. Early on, the latest draft contains this terse statement:

Carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of biomass or biofuel are not included in the cap-and-trade program.

This is alarming. Ignoring biofuels in a cap and trade program is like investing in insulation for your house but forgetting to shut the windows.

Somewhat strangely there's no explanation for this statement. At minimum, however, it demands elaboration as the terms "biomass" and "biofuel" can refer to a vast and diverse array of products, some of which are climate killers and others of which may yet be climate saviors. "Biomass” can refer to everything from corn for ethanol to algae to Indonesian palm oil to Oregon canola. It can refer to argricultural waste from wheat harvesting to the woody slash left by small-scale logging; or it can even mean your table scraps. The point is: these are very different things, with very different features and climate consequences.

"Biofuels" are similarly hard to pin down. On one reading of WCI's statment you might wonder if gasoline blended with corn ethanol and diesel blended with soybean biodiesel will be entirely off the hook? (B-20 biodiesel, for instance, is considered a "biofuel" but it's still 80 percent petroleum-based.) Or does the draft just that the biological components of those fuels will be ignored? Presumably, it's the later, but it would be nice for WCI to say that clearly.

Not that greater clarity alone would solve the problem here. There is evidence that at least some conventional biofuels are harmful to the climate, perhaps extremely harmful. We need to be careful about how we treat them.