Category: energy policy

It is Time to Take the Next Step on Energy Policy

The following piece was first published on energypost.eu and the text is reprinted here as a new blog post.
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US desperately needs a national energy policy
September 24, 2015 by Allan Hoffman

The US – and indeed the world – is at a crossroads when it comes to the choice on how we want to provide energy services in the future, writes US energy expert Allan Hoffman. According to Hoffman, the US desperately needs a national energy policy that recognizes the importance of moving to a renewable energy future as quickly as possible. Without such a policy, economic growth, the environment and national security will suffer.

There are two fundamental ‘things’ needed to sustain human life, water and energy. Water is the more precious of the two as reflected in the Arab saying “Water is life.” Without water life as we know it would not exist, and there are no substitutes for water – without it we die.

We also need energy to power our bodies, derived from chemical conversions of the food we consume. We also need energy to enable the external energy services we rely on in daily life – lighting, heating, cooling, transportation, clean water, communications, entertainment, and commercial and industrial activities. Where energy differs from water as a critical element of sustainable development is the fact that energy is available in many different forms for human use – e.g., by combustion of fossil fuels, nuclear power, and various forms of renewable energy.

Critical juncture

Today the U.S., and indeed the world, stands at a critical juncture on how to provide these energy services in the future. Historically, energy has been provided to some extent by human power, by animal power, and the burning of wood to create heat and light. Wind energy was also used for several centuries to power ships and land-based windmills that provided mechanical energy for water-pumping and threshing. With the discovery and development of large energy resources in the form of stored chemical energy in hydrocarbons such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas, the world turned to the combustion of these fuels to release large amounts of thermal energy and eventually electricity with the development of steam power generators. Nuclear power was introduced in the period following World War II as a new source of heat for producing steam and powering electricity generators and ships.

My recommendation is to put a long-term and steadily increasing price on carbon emissions to motivate appropriate private sector decisions to use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy and let the markets work

Renewable energy, energy that is derived directly or indirectly from the sun’s energy intercepted by the earth (except for geothermal energy that is derived from radioactive decay in the earth’s core), has been available for a while in the form of hydropower, originally in the form of run-of-the-river water wheels, and since the 20th century in the form of large hydroelectric dams. Other forms of renewable energy have emerged recently as important options for the future, driven by steadily reducing costs, the realization that fossil fuels, while currently available in large quantity but eventually depletable, put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when combusted, contributing to global warming and associated climate change. Renewable energy technologies, except for biomass conversion or combustion, puts no carbon into the atmosphere, but even in the biomass case it is a no-net-carbon situation since carbon is absorbed in the growing of biomass materials such as wood and other crops.

Support for renewables is also driven by increasing awareness that while nuclear power generation does not put carbon into the atmosphere it does create multigenerational radioactive waste disposal problems, can be expensive, raises low probability but high consequence safety issues, and is a step on the road to proliferation of nuclear weapons capability. Another driver is the now well documented and growing understanding that renewable energy, in its many forms, can provide the bulk of our electrical energy needs, as long disputed by competing energy sources.

Clean future

All these introductory comments are leading to a discussion of the energy policy choice facing our country, and other countries, and my recommendations for that policy. This choice has been avoided by the U.S. Congress in recent years, much to the short-term and long-term detriment of the U.S. We desperately need a national energy policy that recognizes the importance of energy efficiency and moving to a renewable energy future as quickly as possible. That policy should be one that creates the needed environment for investment in renewable technologies and one that will allow the U.S. to be a major economic player in the world’s inevitable march to a clean energy future.

Before getting into policy specifics, let me add just a few more words on renewable energy technologies. Hydropower is well known as the conversion of the kinetic energy of moving water into electrical energy via turbine generators. Solar energy is the direct conversion of solar radiation directly into electricity via photovoltaic (solar) cells or the use of focused/concentrated solar energy to produce heat and then steam and electricity. Wind energy, an indirect form of solar energy due to uneven heating of the earth’s surface, converts the kinetic energy of the wind into mechanical energy and electricity. Geothermal energy uses the heat of the earth to heat water into steam and electricity, or to heat homes and other spaces directly. Biomass energy uses the chemical energy captured in growing organic material either directly via combustion or in conversion to other fuel sources such as biofuels. Ocean energy uses the kinetic energy in waves and ocean currents, and the thermal energy in heated ocean areas, to create other sources of mechanical and electrical energy. All in all, a rich menu of energy options that we are finally exploring in depth.

Controversial

Energy policy is a complicated and controversial field, reflecting many different national, global, and vested interests. Today’s world is largely powered by fossil fuels and is likely to be so powered for several decades into the future until renewable energy is brought more fully into the mainstream. Unnfortunately this takes time as history teaches, and the needs of developing and developed nations (e.g., in transportation) need to be addressed during the period in which the transition takes place.

The critical need is to move through this transition as quickly as possible. Without clear national energy policies that recognize the need to move away from a fossil fuel-based energy system, and to a low-carbon clean energy future, as quickly as possible, this inevitable transition will be stretched out unnecessarily, with adverse environmental, job-creation, and other economic and national security impacts.

My recommendation is to put a long-term and steadily increasing price on carbon emissions to motivate appropriate private sector decisions to use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy and let the markets work. Nuclear power, another low-carbon technology, remains an option as long as the problems listed earlier can be addressed adequately. My personal view is that renewables are a much better answer.

The revenues generated by such a ‘tax’ can be used to reduce social inequities introduced by such a tax, lower other taxes, and enable investments consistent with long-term national needs. In the U.S. it also provides a means for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, something we have not seen for several decades. It is clear that President Obama ‘gets it’. It is now more than time for U.S. legislators to get it as well.

Editor’s Note (Karel Beckman, energypost.eu)

Allan Hoffman, former Senior Analyst in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), writes a regular blog: Thoughts of a Lapsed Physicist.

On Energy Post, we regularly publish posts from Allan’s blog,in his blog section Policy & Technology. His writings often deal with issues at the intersection of energy technology, policy and markets. Allan, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Brown University, served as Staff Scientist with the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and in a variety of senior management positions at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and the DOE. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Investing In Solar Energy: If Only I Was Younger

As I write this early in my 79th year I am aware not only of my mortality (although I don’t spend much time on that except for getting my bucket list and will in order) but also of the investment opportunity that is coming and that I can’t really take advantage of. It’s long term, longer than I likely have.

It is the realization that the solar revolution is finally unfolding and that we are in the early stages of a sea change that will change the energy picture in major ways for our children and grandchildren over the next few decades of the 21st century. It is an exciting time to be alive, with all the changes coming, but the transition will take time as history teaches. There will also be ups and downs along the way – e.g., the fact that some governments in Europe recently and retroactively cut subsidies and Introduced import tariffs on low cost Chinese solar panels. But the long-term trend is clear.

I say this after forty plus years in the clean energy field, going back to 1969, and being overwhelmed recently by the burgeoning literature on solar and other renewables that appears on my iPad every day – e.g., the following interesting and encoraging piece on ‘community solar’ that appeared recently in the journal Energy and Environment :

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“There’s a tense dynamic accompanying the rapid growth of solar in the United States—in which traditional utility companies, nervous about the spread of rooftop solar panels, are seeking ways to limit the revenues made by solar customers who earn credit for the extra electricity they provide to the grid.

This battle over so-called “net metering” has been often depicted as a zero sum conflict between an upstart and an incumbent — but new research out of the University of Texas at Austin suggests there could be a kind of “middle ground” in the conflict between some utilities and solar installers.

The potential “win-win,” as the researchers put it, involves so-called community solar — solar energy projects or panels that are in effect shared by a group of people, such as the inhabitants of an apartment building, rather than sitting on a single residential rooftop. The study, recently published in Energy Research & Social Science and led by Erik Funkhouser of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and three university colleagues, found that at least some utility companies seem to like community solar programs, are already offering them, and plan to expand them.

One key reason? Customers clearly want access to solar, and some utility industry representatives find community solar to be a great way to give it to them — in a manner that allows the utility to continue to service these customers’ full electricity demand, that is.

“If you are a utility that is concerned with the rapid growth of residential solar — which means that a lot of the demand is moving away from your direct control — in that case you can imagine developing a competitive community solar program that is priced around what a residential system or residential lease might look like, and you might actually price it lower,” says Varun Rai, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin and one of the authors of the study.

The research also suggests yet another way — beyond getting directly into the business of installing rooftop solar, as Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power is now doing — that traditional power companies seem to be finding their way into the hot solar market.

Community solar has certainly been getting a lot of attention lately — largely because of its vast potential to expand solar access.

Last month, the Obama administration announced an array of new initiatives to broaden access to solar energy to more Americans — since so far, solar has generally been the province of relatively wealthy homeowners. Solar City, the top U.S. solar installer, recently announced a massive project to install some 100 “solar gardens” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, with a particular focus on allowing renters to participate in solar energy. And GTM Research, which studies the clean energy industry, projects that community solar will be “the most significant solar growth market for the United States.”

[Many Americans still lack access to solar energy. Here’s how Obama plans to change that]

The new study adds to the theme, reporting on the results of seven utility industry interviews about community solar, as well as the responses to 57 surveys on the subject distributed to investor owned utilities, municipal utilities, and rural electric cooperatives. The researchers also analyzed 61 community solar projects. And they concluded that community solar has the potential for “stabilizing the customer-utility relationship with deeper solar penetration.”

In effect, this is happening because some utilities seem to realize that they’ve got to get involved in the solar wave, the sooner the better. Or as the study put it:

One utility reported that, even without significant penetration of residential solar PV in its territory, staving off potential attrition of its customer base partly drove its adoption of a [community solar] program. Another utility, a large [investor-owned utility], reported that it was motivated to pursue [community solar] for the same reason. The organization anticipates increases in the popularity of solar [distributed generation] going forward. By investing in [community solar] it hopes to satisfy customer demand for solar [distributed generation] as cost-effectively as possible.

The state of California has even mandated that its three main utilities — Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — begin to offer community solar programs, and on a large scale. The utilities are slated to set up 600 megawatts of community solar capacity by 2019.

PG&E’s community solar program, for instance, will allow customers to sign up to get either half or all of their electricity from solar projects that PG&E will “contract with,” or separately make an agreement with an outside solar installer to purchase some of that installer’s electricity gene
ation. Either way, the customers get billing credit from PG&E for not needing to use as much traditional electricity any longer. Initially there will be a premium to be in the program, but PG&E says that will “likely diminish over time if PG&E’s overall generation costs increase and solar costs fall.”

Other community solar programs offered by utilities include the Bright Tucson Community Solar program, offered by Tucson Electric Power, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s SolarShares program.

Granted, for now only a relatively “small fraction” of utilities appear to be moving into the community solar space, according to lead study author Erik Funkhouser. And of course, not all community solar programs are offered by utilities. A group of individuals might start one of their own, of their own volition. A project might also be carried out on a nonprofit basis.

One major difference, notes Rai, is that when individuals set up a community solar program, they often do so with so-called “virtual net metering,” which allows participants in the program to get credit for the electricity generated and thereby reduce their electricity bills, in much the same way that residential solar owners do under current net metering schemes. The only difference is that they don’t actually own the equipment or have it on their own roofs — rather, their credit is divided up virtually among participants in the community solar program.

Rai thinks utilities won’t go for this arrangement, for the same reason that they’ve been so resistant to net metering in general. “For all practical purposes, the only difference between virtual net metering and net metering is, you don’t have the system on your roof,” he says. “But for the utility, you are exactly the same on your bill.”

The power company is still losing out on a portion of the individual’s electricity demand in this case — what has been termed “load defection” — so Rai thinks that utilities will try to offer community solar customers cost savings in a different way: through economies of scale. As prices for solar get lower and lower, community solar plans offered by utilities might simply become a good deal. “It just comes down to what the rate plan is,” Rai says. “If you give me a solar plan that has a benefit, then sure.”

Whether those in the solar camp will agree this is a “win-win” is not so clear, of course — virtual net metering could be the new sticking point.

So in sum, it’s far too early to know yet how this is going to play out — but it’s just another sign that we can expect major dynamism in the solar space, not only due to growth overall but as incumbent utilities try to compete with the upstart solar industry. For now, utility-offered community solar is just the latest indication of that.

“It’s a very early phase of a very interesting business model,” says Rai.”
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I could list many other articles that lead to the same conclusion, that some U.S. utilities have finally begun to come to grips with the reality that renewable energy (not just solar but also hydropower, wind, geothermal, biomass, ocean energy), when combined with a smart national grid and cost-effective energy storage, can eventually provide the vast majority of our electrical energy needs, including the anticipated demand growth from electrified transportation vehicles. Utitilities in Germany came to this conclusion earlier, largely due to Germany’s energy policy that encouraged installation of wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies through provision of so-called feed-in tariffs (FiTs). FiTs is a policy mechanism that provides an extra fee (tariff) above the retail rate of electricity to provide long-term security to renewable energy producers, typically based on the cost of generation of each technology.

At this point in time solar energy is the fastest growing energy source in the world today, having recently passed wind energy for this distinction. Of course solar starts from a small base and has a long way to go to provide a significant share of the world’s electrical energy. Nevertheless, when one looks at recent trends in various countries such as the UK, China, India, Australia, and others, let alone the U.S., it is clear that large parts of the world have accepted the inevitability of a renewable energy future, with a large part of that future being based on solar energy. In addition, African nations are beginning to expand their economies and take advantage of their extensive renewable energy resources, particularly solar, and the related investment opportunities are huge.

All this leads me to believe that the transition to renewables is well underway and offers not only investment opportunities for those with insight and patience, but also a response to the challenge presented by global climate change. With care being paid to where the investments are made, the financial returns should be quite impressive in the decades ahead. If only I were younger.

One More Blog Post About Global Warming

I admit to be being concerned about global warming, its many impacts, present and future, on human welfare, and the insidious fact that those least responsible for global warming and the resultant climate change are likely to suffer the most serious impacts. I also admit to anger at my fellow humans, both scientific and political, who continue to deny the scientific basis for concern about global warming when the consensus among scientists is overwhelming, an unusual situation in science. It is a failure for which the deniers and minimizers should be held accountable.

In retrospect it is easy to reflect on human history and find examples where numbers of people, some highly educated and well respected, were wrong about important events and changes in society. Certainly many were sincere in their ultimately incorrect beliefs, based on limited available information and their life experiences and inevitable mental filters for processing that information. Others were undoubtedly self-serving opportunists who perhaps knew better but compromised their integrity. In this latter category I include those scientists and other well-informed people who denied the link between smoking and serious health effects, and more recently those who deny global warming or minimize its impacts. In my mind they are people who have sold their souls for filthy lucre.

What is so hard to understand about global warming? It is the same physical process that occurs in a car on a hot day that we all experience. The visible light rays from the sun, distributed in a spectrum determined by the sun’s surface temperature (about 5,500C) easily penetrate the car’s glass windows and are absorbed by the car’s interior which gets warm and often hot to the touch. These warm or hot surfaces then reradiate in a spectrum different from the sun’s radiative spectrum because of their vastly different surface temperatures. The basic physics is the same – Planck’s Law, first proposed in 1900, determines the spectral distribution and intensities of the radiation emitted by a black body at temperature T. In a car the reradiated heat from the interior surfaces is mostly in the infrared region which the glass is not as transparent to as it is to the visible radiation from the sun. This trapping of the reradiated heat causes the car’s interior temperature to rise until enough reradiated infrared radiation gets through the glass due to the interior’s now higher temperature to provide a balance between the energy of the incoming and outgoing radiation streams. This is exactly what happens in the earth’s atmosphere, with gases in the atmosphere playing the role of the glass windshield and determining the atmosphere’s transmission characteristics. Important global warming gases are CO2, largely from combustion of fossil fuels, and natural gas (methane), and a few others. The earth’s current temperatures, hospitable to life, reflect such an energy balance between the sun and the earth. Venus is an example of where the equilibrium temperature reached by the planet to achieve an energy balance with the sun is much higher.

This is a long introduction to my real purpose in this blog post, to share with you a recent statement on global warming that was forwarded to me by a colleague. I found it clearly written, insightful and powerful. Its author is Dr. David Vernon who has advanced degrees in mathematics and life sciences. He has had a long career in technical areas, and currently serves as a principal at Carbontech Global LLC. Carbontech’s mission is to turn “..organic waste streams into renewable energy streams..”

The statement follows:
“On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:57 PM, David Vernon wrote:
Global warming is not a theory. It is a measurement, known to the climate science community since 1900. Climate change as a result of global warming is a physical phenomenon. Certain air masses become weaker, others stronger, the circulation changes, the sea currents change, etc. It is just physics. The CO2 hypothesis was first presented in the 1920s by a Nobel-winning chemist, who proved that it was possible for increased atmospheric CO2, another actual physical measurement, to account for the increase in the average earth surface temperature. The amount of carbon required to double tropospheric CO2 from .04% to .08% is huge – there is no place for it to have come from except the burning of coal for 250 years. Until the advent of supercomputers in the 1980s, it was impossible to calculate the appropriate correlation statistics within a human lifetime, but by 1990 the math was done – the case is, as we say, proven. it is coal burning for energy that has warmed the globe, counteracting the ice-age cooling that is produced by orbital, rotational, and solar cycles, threatening our coastal settlements, our water supplies, and our agricultural production while increasing the severity and intensity of all storms. Scientists are now debating how bad this will get for us, how soon, and how this will ultimately affect the oncoming ice age.

This is not rocket science. The reason it took supercomputers was the volume of point data to be included in the calculations. The earth is about 8,000 miles thick, giving a surface are of more than 200 million square miles. Even one data point per square mile is unmanageably large. Furthermore, air movement is driven by pressure and temperature differences, which are in turn changed by air movement, so there are second order, third order, and higher order effects which must also be included in any mathematical analysis.

The issue is the inconvenience of the truth. The United States derives about 40% of its electricity from coal combustion. Several States, many companies, and thousands of Americans depend on this coal business for their livelihoods. This is not a problem in “right and wrong”. it is a problem in complex and conflicting human interests. It is wishful thinking to cope with an inconvenient truth by denying it. It is also human nature. However, we cannot command physics, or chemistry, or even biology, and we can barely control our own human behavior. Perhaps it is time to return to the meaning of republican government – we choose the smartest and least corruptible people to represent us, make these decisions for us, and counteract the pressure from short term interests for short term gains. Without life, money is just trash.”

I hope you find this statement as powerful as I did.

Note: this week marks the 2-year anniversary of this blog – my first blog post was published on May 29, 2013. I intend to keep blogging on this site, but perhaps less frequently than to date (93 posts in 104 weeks) as some of my energies are being diverted to writing a book on the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables as seen by me since 1969. I hope to finish the book within the calendar year, but as I’ve learned from several book-writing friends it is not easy to gauge how long it will take. It will be a personal, not a technical, book – my views on the technical aspects of energy issues are well documented in this blog.

Financing the Growth of Renewable Energy in Scotland

This is a follow-up to my previous blog post ‘The Exciting Changes Taking Place in Scotland’s Energy System’ that discusses how Scotland’s already impressive and steadily increasing deployment of renewable energy systems is being financed.  While technology costs  will always be an important part of the total cost of deploying renewable energy systems, as these costs come down with technological advances, large scale manufacturing, and increased deployment experience, financing costs imposed by lending institutions, whether private or public, take on increasing  importance.  Financing of emerging technology options has always been recognized as a critical barrier, and demonstrating the ‘bankability’ of proposed projects requires careful attention in the planning phases. Finance issues are a major focus of the annual meeting of Scottish Renewables, the representative body of the Scottish renewable energy industry since 1996. It has over 300 members and member organisations, ranging across all technologies and supply chains.

As reported in the previous blog post, Scotland now generates enough wind energy to meet its entire residential electricity demand, and renewables are Scotland’s largest source of electrical power, with much more to come. How this came about is a case study in the importance of national policy in support of renewable generation, a policy still needing implementation in the United States.

Scotland, a separate country with its own parliament even though formally a part of the United Kingdom, has set two important energy goals: to achieve 100% renewable electricity generation by 2020 and achieve zero carbon emissions from all power generation by 2030. In support of these goals the Scottish Government has set up several financing programs that offer assistance to renewable energy projects in both the planning and deployment phases. These include the Scottish Government Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES), Scottish Investment Bank’s Renewable Energy Investment Fund (REIF), and Home Energy Scotland. Community Energy Scotland is a registered charity that provides practical help for communities on green energy development and energy conservation. It is supported separately by local communities. Each program is described briefly below.

CARES is a loan fund established in 2011 “..to provide loans toward the high risk, pre-planning consent stage of renewable energy projects which have significant community engagement and benefit.” It is managed by localenergyscotland.org on behalf of the Scottish Government. A part of CARES, the Local Energy Challenge Fund, was established more recently “..to demonstrate the value and benefit of local low-carbon energy economies.”

CARES financing is designed to to support high-risk early planning stages widely recognized as principal barriers for resource-limited small businesses and community groups. Its key features include:
– financing of initial planning of any renewable energy project up to 5MW in size in a competitive process
– unsecured loans of up to £150,000 (£1 = $1.55) for up to 90% of project costs
– a fixed interest rate of 10%

Phase 1 of the Local Energy Challenge Fund attracted 114 applications and 17 were funded. Phase 2 is currently underway. Phase 1 projects include a community district heating scheme, community use of hydrogen, ground source heat pump projects, and development of community microgrids.

The Renewable Energy Investment Fund, established in 2012, supports projects at the demonstration and commercialization stage that
“- Deliver energy from a renewable source, reduce the cost of renewable energy or provide key solutions for renewable energy generation
– Provide benefit to the economy of Scotland
– Have a demonstrable funding gap for REIF to consider
– Be at a sufficient stage of development to require REIF funding before March 2016”

Some of the project types that REIF can support include marine energy, community owned renewables, and renewable district heating. The REIF team also provides technical advice and assistance in finding other funding sources. Its £103 million fund is available to provide commercially priced loans, equity investments, and loan guarantees. Initial projects include
– a £735,000 loan to the Islay Energy Community Benefit Society to install a community owned, 330KW wind turbine on the island,
– a £615,000 loan to a village in Stirlingshire in support of their efforts to become a zero-carbon, zero-waste community,
– a £700,000 loan to support the first phase of the 0.5MW Shetland Tidal Array, and
– a £250,000 loan to support development of the AWS-III wave energy device.

Home Energy Scotland provides up to 75% of the total cost of installing a renewable energy system up to £10,000, and up to 100% of the total cost of connecting to a district heating scheme up to £5,000. Loans are available to owner occupiers in Scotland for existing and new residential buildings. Loan amounts and repayment schedules vary by technology – e.g., the maximum loan amount for installation of a PV system is £2,500 and a maximum loan repayment period of 5 years, while the maximums for installation of a ground source to water heat pump are £10,000 and 12 years. In all cases a Green Deal Assessment of the proposed project is required and installers must be certified.

Community Energy Scotland supports community-owned projects by providing funding for feasibility studies, planning, community consultation, and help in finding funding sources. Supported projects include energy audits, energy efficiency improvements, micro-renewables installations, and installation of wind turbines.

All of the above paints a clear and exciting picture of a country committed to a clean energy future that is willing to back up its words with substantial and ongoing budgets. Scotland may thus prove to be an example to the rest of the world as we leave the fossil fuel era and move into the new era of renewable energy.

Addressing Climate Change – A Needed Policy

The following editorial appeared today (25 April 2015) in the Washington Post:

““CLIMATE CHANGE can no longer be denied,” President Obama said in Everglades National Park on Wednesday. “It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation.” No matter how much, Mr. Obama might have added, Republican presidential hopefuls would like to neglect the matter.
Since the GOP presidential season began, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), the first major Republican to declare his candidacy, sounded the most extreme note on global warming, insisting that his attacks on scientists make him akin to Galileo standing up to 16th-century theological authorities. Shortly after announcing his candidacy, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) offered some vague doubts about how much humans contribute to climate change. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has not yet formally entered the race, said that he is “concerned” about climate change and that the United States should negotiate with other nations about it, but he also suggested that the private economy has already addressed the problem and that he’s more worried about the “hollowing out of our industrial core.”
The common element among GOP leaders is resistance to the notion that the government needs a significant policy against greenhouse-gas emissions. What would the national conversation be like if Mr. Obama got his way and they accepted the need to act with ambition?
Ironically, it wouldn’t be kind to some of Mr. Obama’s policies, but that’s not his fault. Because of the GOP’s abdication, the Obama administration has cobbled together a climate plan from legal authorities it could exercise without Congress’s say-so. The result is an awkwardly designed and inefficient approach. A more reasonable Congress could shape a more efficient plan, with an eye toward sparing the economy gratuitous pain.
Economists have known for decades how to do this. First, the government should eliminate energy subsidies of all kinds — for fmossil fuels as well as renewable energy. Then Congress should put a significant tax on carbon-dioxide emissions and set it to rise over time. The resulting market forces would decide how the economy would move to a greener state. Consumers and businesses would have more reason to consider wasting less electricity, buying efficient appliances and investing in products that require less carbon dioxide to make. Generators of electricity would have an incentive to use cleaner fuels and renewable sources of energy — when it makes economic sense, not when the Environmental Protection Agency decides they must. Companies that exploit giveaway subsidy policies would have to compete fairly.
Republicans, meanwhile, could return any revenue raised to taxpayers, either directly or by reducing taxes on labor, on corporations or in any manner of their choosing.
The nation’s climate debate has been impoverished by the absence of responsible conservative voices. A revenue-neutral carbon tax is a reform Republicans should love. It could end irrational federal subsidies, lower the GOP’s most-hated taxes and harness market efficiency to provide some insurance for the planet at a minimal cost. Instead, the party’s would-be leaders appear to be looking for any way to avoid engaging seriously.”

I don’t always agree with the Post’s editorial positions, but on this subject I agree strongly.  My views on the need for putting a price on carbon emissions to allow market forces to address global warming and climate change are well documented in several of the posts you will find on this blog web site. I also agree, and have written, that government subsidies to energy companies are unbalanced and need redress if not outright elimination so that energy technologies can compete on a level playing field. I also agree that using the resulting revenue proceeds of putting a price on carbon emissions to address inequities and reduce other taxes is a basis for bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.

It is more than time for the U.S. Congress to get on the right side of history and address the global warming issue in a way that protects the long-term interests of the nation and the larger global community.