CS3 In the News

By Michael Davidson

China’s first mandatory carbon emissions trading system (ETS) pilot debuted last month before a packed auditorium in the southern city of Shenzhen. China’s first official carbon trade was greeted with fanfare and a well-choreographed script of climate officials. Shenzhen is the first of seven cities and provinces expected to unveil cap-and-trade programs in China this year, which drew skeptical reactions from foreign onlookers based on the first day’s low volume – 21,120 tons at 28-30 yuan / ton ($4.55-$5.05).

The ETS pilots are a small market-based component of a broader climate policy that has historically relied on administrative measures carried in five-year plans. The overriding priorities for provincial officials are energy and carbon intensity reduction targets, most recently allocated in 2011. Nationally, these amount to 16% and 17% reductions in energy use and carbon emissions per unit GDP, respectively, by 2015; a 40-45% carbon intensity reduction below 2005 levels by 2020. However, ensuring an early emissions peak (i.e., before 2030) will require more flexible approaches, in particular, market mechanisms, for which the ETS pilots are a useful bellwether. While the merits of the pilots should not be judged by the first trading day, significant obstacles stand in the way of creating a national ETS by 2016, as currently envisioned by the Chinese leadership. Even before the remaining six trading pilots ring the opening bell, we have a good sense of what these obstacles will be. 

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(Also covered by WSJ, WaPo, NYT, Reuters, Bloomberg, LA Times, Nat Geo, Nature, Discover, CNN, BBC, Guardian, Sky News, International Business Times, Financial Times, The Telegraph, Daily Mail,  China.org)

By Lousie Watt

BEIJING (AP) — A new study links heavy air pollution from coal burning to shorter lives in northern China. Researchers estimate that the half-billion people alive there in the 1990s will live an average of 5½ years less than their southern counterparts because they breathed dirtier air.

China itself made the comparison possible: for decades, a now-discontinued government policy provided free coal for heating, but only in the colder north. Researchers found significant differences in both particle pollution of the air and life expectancy in the two regions, and said the results could be used to extrapolate the effects of such pollution on lifespans elsewhere in the world.

The study by researchers from China, Israel and the United States was published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While previous studies have found that pollution affects human health, "the deeper and ultimately more important question is the impact on life expectancy," said one of the authors, Michael Greenstone, a professor of environmental economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"This study provides a unique setting to answer the life expectancy question because the (heating) policy dramatically alters pollution concentrations for people who appear to be of otherwise identical health," Greenstone said in an email. "Further, due to the low rates of migration in China in this period, we can know people's exposure over long time periods," he said.

The policy gave free coal for fuel boilers to heat homes and offices to cities north of the Huai River, which divides China into north and south. It was in effect for much of the 1950-1980 period of central planning, and, though discontinued after 1980, it has left a legacy in the north of heavy coal burning, which releases particulate pollutants into the air that can harm human health. Researchers found no other government policies that treated China's north differently from the south.

The researchers collected data for 90 cities, from 1981 to 2000, on the annual daily average concentration of total suspended particulates. In China, those are considered to be particles that are 100 micrometers or less in diameter, emitted from sources including power stations, construction sites and vehicles.

The researchers estimated the impact on life expectancies using mortality data from 1991-2000. They found that in the north, the concentration of particulates was 184 micrograms per cubic meter — or 55 percent — higher than in the south, and life expectancies were 5.5 years lower on average across all age ranges.

The researchers said the difference in life expectancies was almost entirely due to an increased incidence of deaths classified as cardiorespiratory — those from causes that have previously been linked to air quality, including heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and respiratory illnesses.

Total suspended particulates include fine particulate matter called PM2.5 — particles with diameters of no more than 2.5 micrometers. PM2.5 is of especially great health concern because it can penetrate deep into the lungs, but the researchers lacked the data to analyze those tiny particles separately.

The authors said their research can be used to estimate the effect of total suspended particulates on other countries and time periods. Their analysis suggests that every additional 100 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter in the atmosphere lowers life expectancy at birth by about three years.

The study also noted that there was a large difference in particulate matter between the north and south, but not in other forms of air pollution such as sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard School of Public Health who has researched the health effects of fine particulate matter in the U.S., said the study was "fascinating."

China's different treatment of north and south allowed researchers to get pollution data that would be impossible in a scientific setting.

Dominici said the quasi-experimental approach was a good approximation of a randomized experiment, "especially in this situation where a randomized experiment is not possible."

She said she wasn't surprised by the findings, given China's high levels of pollution.

"In the U.S. I think it's pretty much been accepted that even small changes in PM2.5, much, much, much smaller than what they are observing in China, are affecting life expectancy," said Dominici, who was not involved in the study.

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Climate change seems like this complicated problem with a million pieces. But Henry Jacoby, an economist at MIT's business school, says there's really just one thing you need to do to solve the problem: Tax carbon emissions.

"If you let the economists write the legislation," Jacoby says, "it could be quite simple." He says he could fit the whole bill on one page.

Basically, Jacoby would tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon they release. That would make coal, oil and natural gas more expensive. That's it; that's the whole plan.

Jacoby's colleague John Reilly told me the price of gasoline might rise by 25 cents a gallon in the first year. Over time, that would increase. By 2050, Reilly figures the carbon tax would add about $1 to the price of every gallon. Across the economy, prices of energy-intensive goods and services would rise. This would encourage people and businesses to be more efficient.

This is why economists love a carbon tax: One change to the tax code and the entire economy shifts to reduce carbon emissions. No complicated regulations. No rules for what kind of gas mileage cars have to get or what specific fraction of electricity has to come from wind or solar or renewables. That's by and large the way we do it now.

Reilly says the current web of rules is a more complicated and more expensive way of getting the same outcome as a carbon tax. The current system "pretty much is one of the worst ways we could do it," he says.

As with any fix for climate change, a carbon tax would hit some people harder than others. People with long commutes would pay more. People who work in coal mines could lose their jobs.

But here is where Reilly brings up what is perhaps the most surprising thing about a carbon tax: If you do it right, he says, carbon tax can be nearly painless for the economy as a whole. 

Besides reducing carbon emissions, a carbon tax brings in a bunch of money – it's a tax after all. So, Reilly says, you can reduce, say, income tax to balance out the new taxes people are paying for carbon emissions. People pay more for gas, but they get to keep more of their income.

I called around and talked to a bunch of economists about this, and they said the basic idea was sound: If you give the carbon-tax money back by cutting income taxes, you can probably offset a lot of the pain.

President Obama has indicated he would support a market-based solution to climate change. But a carbon tax would of course require an act of Congress. And right now, that seems unlikely.

By: Joel Kirkland and Peter Behr

June 26, 2013

President Obama's plan to use a mixture of mandates and flexible regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions is being viewed by energy industry experts through an age-old axiom: The devil is in the details.

The plan appears to be a shot in the arm for natural gas, as Obama's proposed regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants would provide a boost to cleaner-burning gas generators.

The White House's second-term climate agenda faces daunting head winds. Opposition from Republicans and resistance from coal-state Democrats, and the nuts and bolts of crafting a policy that would mark a significant shift for the nation's electric power industry, are immediate hurdles. Court challenges could create a protracted process for regulating carbon, as it has for U.S. EPA regulations of toxic air pollutants pushed through by the Obama administration.

But the daily stir of coal, natural gas and electricity markets in the United States also matters. With details of the new carbon policy still to come, unpredictable market prices will continue to be an underlying driver of decisions by electricity producers about where to invest and what energy sources to dispatch. Abundant coal will battle it out with growing shale gas production, several experts interviewed by EnergyWire predicted.

"There is no disagreement that the environmental regulations, many of which were proposed during the Bush administration, are going to bind and cause several -- tens of gigawatts -- of coal plants to be uneconomic," said Jay Apt, director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University. "If gas prices stay reasonable, then people will be buying gas plants. 

Obama rolled out his climate plan in the blistering summer heat. Yesterday's speech on a Georgetown University quad rested on the premise that rising concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are the result of industrial emissions and that unregulated U.S. power sector emissions are contributing too much to rising temperatures.

The White House directive for EPA to begin drawing up a proposal to regulate existing coal-fired power plants had already been set in motion. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that EPA could not sidestep its authority to regulate emissions tied to climate change. The agency later issued an "endangerment finding" that created a legal foundation for regulating carbon. 

"We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury and sulfur and arsenic in our air and water, but power plants can still dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the air for free," Obama said in the speech. "That's not right, that's not safe, and it needs to stop."

Carbon economics

How you get there might be left up to the most unpredictable factor of them all: the economy.

"If you want to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you need a substantial reduction of emissions," Apt said.

"Meeting greenhouse gas targets in a flat-growth economy, where the industrial use of electric power is the same now as it was in the early 1990s, is very different than a scenario in which you blithely say growth is going to be 3 percent a year," he said.

A range of factors affect the immediate future of electric power generation, said Metin Celebi, a principal with the Brattle Group. "The most important one is the gas price relative to the coal price," Celebi said.

The future direction of that price is anyone's guess, given how many questions remain about the pace of shale gas production.

Of the nation's approximately 300 GW of coal-burning power generation capacity, nearly 40 GW was targeted for retirement by 2016, according to a Brattle analysis.

More "lenient" regulatory controls, along the lines expected from the Obama administration, could cause that total to rise to nearly 60 GW, the Brattle report says. A very strict policy could raise that to 77 GW of coal plant capacity retirements.

Lower gas prices plus strict regulations could cause almost half of the U.S. coal fleet to retire, a scenario that Celebi and his colleagues concluded in an October 2012 report would likely be untenable for electricity producers.

This shift is occurring for both short-term price and longer-range policy reasons that are not easy to separate. Most energy companies expect that at some point, an explicit or implicit price will be placed on power plant carbon emissions, and that particularly burdens coal plants, whose carbon footprint is twice that of efficient gas generators, said Katherine Spector, executive director of commodities strategy for CIBC World Markets Corp.

That expectation affects companies' decision on retiring or retaining older, inefficient coal plants. "It's actually a combination of the two" -- price and policy -- "and the policy environment could significantly accelerate the trend," Spector said.

The drop in natural gas prices over the past two years has tilted production in gas's favor, particularly in competitive power markets where the two kinds of power plants seek low-bid opportunities to run hour by hour.

Until shale gas production flattened gas prices, coal held a solid lead. In April 2011, coal-fired plants accounted for 41 percent of electric power output, compared to 23 percent for natural gas. A year later, the two fuels' shares were almost identical. Then gas prices moved up again from less than $2 per thousand cubic feet to $4 recently, and coal made a comeback. Its share of electricity production was 38 percent this April compared to 26 percent for gas.

But an expectation of relatively cheap gas also affects decisions on the future of coal plants. "It is a different world in gas prices than we had three or four years ago," Celebi said. "Gas price projections have come down substantially, and that's something you can put more weight on."

The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the Energy Department, noted in its 2013 annual energy outlook that "the interaction of fuel prices and environmental rules is a key factor in coal plant retirements."

For all the price and production scenarios EIA considered, less than 15 GW of new coal-fired capacity would be added between 2012 and 2040. "For new builds, natural gas and renewables generally are more competitive than coal, and concerns surrounding potential future GHG [greenhouse gas] legislation also dampen interest in new coal-fired capacity," EIA said.

Shutting one-third of coal

A 2012 paper by a team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Henry Jacoby said the increased gas supply boosts the power industry's flexibility to meet baseload electricity demand if expectations about nuclear power don't pan out or coal retirements speed up.

Under an aggressive policy to slash carbon that requires a 50 percent emissions reduction below 2005 levels by 2050, there would have to be "substantial changes in energy technology."

If the development of shale gas became too expensive, gas use would "grow slightly for a few decades." Toward the end of that period, however, "it would be priced out of this use because of the combination of rising producer prices and the emissions penalty."

Renewable energy would grow to 29 percent of power demand, and coal would keep a substantial position in the power pie. 

Fact sheets issued by the administration yesterday left crucial questions about the policy plans unanswered, noted ClearView Energy Partners, "especially the threshold levels of emissions that will govern new and existing [generation] units."

On a back-of-the-envelope assessment, ClearView said that if the administration adopts a formula proposed by the Natural Resources Defense Council calling for a limit of 1,500 pounds of CO2 equivalent per megawatt-hour of electricity production, it could add another 70 GW of coal plant retirements by 2020. That's on top of the 40 GW of expected retirements tied to current EPA rules on mercury emissions and air toxins, the ClearView analysis said. 

"In the aggregate, this adds up to a shutdown of roughly one-third of U.S. coal-fired generating capacity within the space of a decade," ClearView said. "Program design matters, too. The inclusion of offsetting emissions reduction mechanisms could keep more coal online."

Republicans in Congress have accused the Obama administration of threatening grid reliability through its pressures on coal-fired generation.

Celebi said that remains a big question. "It depends on where and when those plants retire," he said. "If it's a long period of time, the markets will have a chance to respond by cutting consumption or adding other resources. 

"If it's too much, too quick, that will not be feasible," he said. 

State foot-dragging

Politics soured the policy debate starting in 2009, electricity demand declined as the economy slumped, and natural gas prices fell to record lows in 2012.

Meanwhile, the technology-driven onshore drilling boom has turned up a "bridge fuel" to cleaner forms of electricity. And the White House has been openly supporting gas's role in combating climate change and spurring economic growth, despite concerns about methane emissions -- a potent greenhouse gas -- tied to upstream gas production.

"Sometimes there are disputes about natural gas," Obama said yesterday. "But let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions."

For electric utilities, the latest White House climate plan comes nearly four years after a bruising period of political wrangling over carbon cap-and-trade legislation. In 2009, the Edison Electric Institute was mired in the details of a bill that would distribute emissions credits for power generators to buy and sell under a carbon pollution cap. EEI's Tom Kuhn, president of the trade group of investor-owned utilities, had put together a fragile coalition of companies that could support the approach to ratcheting down emissions.

The premise behind the coalition-building had been that it's better to have a "market-based" program shaped by Congress than to leave it to top-down EPA regulations under the existing Clean Air Act.

The House passed the cap-and-trade bill by a slim margin in the summer of 2009, a signature achievement for House Democrats, but one that rested on compromises too politically hot for the Senate. The divisive debate revved up an opposition campaign targeting the science and politics of climate change. Republican leaders used the defeated legislation as a cudgel in the 2010 elections.

Since then, EPA has continued to tighten rules around conventional pollutants. New plants will have to comply with Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rules. Other regulations addressing water intake and cooling water discharge are also shaping utility industry plans. Conventional coal gradually is being forced out of power portfolios.

Also on the table is an EPA draft rule that would cap carbon emissions at 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour of generation for newly built power plants. The standard, which encourages fuel-switching to gas, would put the kibosh on new coal-fired power plants.

In a prepared statement after the president's speech yesterday, EEI's Kuhn urged EPA to put in place measures that "contain achievable compliance limits and deadlines" and "are consistent with the industry's ongoing investments to transition to a cleaner generating fleet and enhanced electric grid." 

"It is also critical that fuel diversity and support for clean energy technologies be maintained, not hindered," Kuhn added.

The slowdown in electricity demand in the United States has helped enable efficiency technology and power plant retrofits to control pollution. But analysts and executives from powerful utilities like Georgia-based Southern Co. and Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. Inc. have said carbon limits pose the biggest risk to their coal fleet. 

State utility commissions responsible for regulating power plants could slow the shift to low-carbon standards, analysts said. 

"There will be litigation and foot-dragging on the part of some states in developing implementation plans," said Adele Morris, an energy economist at the Brookings Institution. "I think EPA is in the early stages of what they would even propose."

By: Elizabeth Rowe

June 25, 2013

We all know that air conditioning eats up an enormous amount of energy. We also know that installing ceiling fans would allow us to use the air conditioner a lot less. And we all know the savings over time would pay for the ceiling fan. So why aren’t there more people buying ceiling fans? 

That question, and many more like it, are at the center of a research project launched by the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and MIT’s Center for Energy & Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). The initiative, known as the E2e Project, will work to understand cost-effective ways to reduce energy use and the obstacles that sometimes get in the way.

Drawing on the skills of both engineers and economists from MIT and Berkeley, the project derives its name from its mission: finding a smart way to go from using a larger amount of energy, or “E,” to a smaller amount of energy, or “e.”

Much of the impetus for this project comes from the McKinsey Curve, a cost curve that asserts that there are “negative cost” energy efficiency investments that essentially pay for themselves. “There’s a fair bit of evidence out there that suggests there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of energy savings, but much of that evidence is based on engineering models,” says E2e co-director Christopher Knittel, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and CEEPR co-director. “Much of the engineering research ignores behavioral changes that might come in response to those investments, and those behavioral changes can manifest themselves in many ways.”

For example, Knittel says, households might turn their thermostat down in the summer or up in the winter if heating and cooling homes become more energy-efficient. Such behaviors, which reduce the benefits of energy efficiency, aren’t accounted for in engineering models, he says.

One study undertaken by E2e will determine how much energy the federal Weatherization Assistance Program saves. The project examines low-income households in Michigan that received free efficiency upgrades, such as insulation and weatherproofing, and audits their energy use over time to find out why actual efficiency gains are less than expected. Final results are expected later this year.

According to Knittel, E2e has three main objectives. One is to determine whether these “negative-cost” investments truly exist. The second is to understand which of these investments has the greatest return on investment. And third, E2e will try to understand why consumers and companies aren’t making these investments if they truly have a negative cost.

E2e’s co-director, Professor Catherine Wolfram, an associate professor at Haas and co-director of the Energy Institute, says E2e has a broader goal, too: “At the heart, I think we’re interested in finding the lowest-cost way to mitigate climate change.” She adds, “In the short term we hope to deliver to policymakers some really good information about where human behavior might influence energy efficiency technology and policy.”

John Reilly, co-director of the Joint Program on Global Change, served on the committee responsible for a new National Research Council (NRC) report on the “Effects of U.S. Tax Policy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”

The report found that while tax policies can make a substantial contribution to meeting the nation's climate change objectives, the current approaches do not. In fact, current federal tax provisions have a minimal net effect on greenhouse gas emissions. While the report does not make any recommendations about specific changes to the tax code, it says that policies that target emissions directly, such a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, would be the most effective and efficient ways of reducing greenhouse gases.

Reilly, with colleague Sebastian Rausch, authored a report last summer that demonstrated the benefits of a tax on carbon emissions, that could be part of a broader tax reform package.

“Congress will face many difficult tradeoffs in stimulating the economy and job growth while reducing the deficit,” said Reilly at the time the report was released. “But with the carbon tax there are virtually no serious tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced.”

The study — “Carbon Tax Revenue and the Budget Deficit: A Win-Win-Win Solution?”— calculated the impact a carbon tax starting at $20 per ton would have using a national economic model that details energy, taxes and household incomes. Reilly and his co-author Sebastian Rausch, now at ETH Zurich University, found that the tax would raise $1.5 trillion in revenue. That money could then be used to reduce personal or corporate income taxes, extend the payroll tax cut that expires this year, maintain spending on social programs—or some combination of these options—while reducing the deficit.

The NRC study came after Congress requested that a committee evaluate the most important tax provisions that affect carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions and estimate the magnitude of the effects.  The report considers both energy-related provisions — such as transportation fuel taxes, oil and gas depletion allowances, subsidies for ethanol, and tax credits for renewable energy — as well as broad-based provisions that may have indirect effects on emissions.

Reilly notes that his “win-win-win” study on carbon taxes showed that by “shifting the market through a tax on emissions rather than through tax credits for renewable sources, the nation would be raising revenue rather than spending it.”

Parts of the NRC’s media release were adapted for use in this news story.

To read more about the NRC’s report, click here.

To read more about the “Carbon Tax Revenue and the Budget Deficit: A Win-Win-Win Solution?” click here.  

It’s something we hear from policymakers again and again: The world squanders too much energy. And wringing out that waste should be one of the easiest ways for the United States and other countries to save money and curb pollution.

But as it turns out, much of what we know about the topic of energy-efficiency is still fairly hazy. Sure, it’s technically doable to make cars more fuel-efficient or insulate homes to prevent heat from leaking out. But which of these efforts are really the most cost-effective? And if it’s such a no-brainer, why aren’t people already taking these steps?

The fact that we still don’t have great answers to those questions is what inspired a group of economists at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley to launch a big new project, called E2e, that will try to apply more scientific rigor to the whole topic of energy efficiency.

“Almost all of the previous work on energy efficiency comes from engineering studies, which look at what’s possible under ideal conditions,” says Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT and co-director of the E2e project. “We wanted to ask a slightly different question — what are the actual returns you could expect in the real world?”

Here’s what he means. In 2009, McKinsey & Co. released an eye-popping study demonstrating that the United States could hugely improve the efficiency of its homes, offices and factories, through strategies like sealing leaky building ducts and upgrading old appliances. By doing so, McKinsey estimated, the country could save $680 billion dollars over 10 years and do the climate equivalent of taking all the nation’s cars off the road.

Yet as economists scrutinized those numbers, they realized the picture is more complex. ”Those engineering studies can’t account for the behavioral changes you might see in response to efficiency improvements,” says MIT’s Christopher Knittel, who also co-directs the E2e project. “People could, for instance, start adjusting their thermostat if it becomes cheaper to cool the house.” (This is known as the “rebound effect.”)

Ideally, says Knittel, researchers would start conducting rigorous, randomized controlled trials to find out precisely how effective various efficiency policies are. The E2e  Web site lists some of the detailed work that has been done on this front — though there aren’t many such studies.

One recent study of Mexico, for instance, found that a government program to help people to upgrade their refrigerators with energy-saving models really did curtail electricity use. However, a similar program for air conditioners had the opposite effect — when people got sleeker A/C units, they used them more often, and energy use went up.

“The point is that policymakers aren’t going to spend an infinite amount of money trying to save energy or reduce greenhouse gases,” Greenstone says. “So the motivation is to find the places where the return is the greatest. If you could reduce a ton of carbon-dioxide for $100 or two tons for $50, you’d choose the latter.”

The researchers are also asking why, if it’s so compelling, people and businesses don’t already take steps to become more energy efficient. Is it because people aren’t aware that they can? Are there actual market barriers that could be addressed by policy? (For instance, landlords may have little incentive to invest in energy-saving appliances for their tenants.) Or is it just that the purported savings aren’t worth it in the first place?

“It’s easy to come up with conjectures for why people aren’t choosing more efficient options,” says Catherine Wolfram, an economist at the Energy Institute of Haas in Berkeley. “Maybe people don’t have the right information, maybe people are procrastinating. But right now, these are just stories. It’s an area where we need more evidence.”

Some work is being done on this front. Knittel, for instance, is conducting an experiment to see whether people will buy more fuel-efficient cars if they simply receive more detailed information about gasoline costs and mileage. Greenstone and Wolfram are carrying out a randomized controlled trial to scrutinize a U.S. government program to help weather-proof the homes of low-income people.

“Part of the reason we started this project is that efficiency is one of the few areas where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that these are policies we should be pursuing,” Greenstone says. “And we want to be able to show what actually works and what doesn’t.”

"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

A version of this quote, originally penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” appears in a dog-eared copy of “Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers” on a shelf in Pierre Lermusiaux’s office. The textbook, which he has kept since he was an engineering undergraduate in Belgium, introduces each chapter with a quote from the fictional sleuth — a literary prompt that pushed Lermusiaux, as a young student, to keep reading.

The quote above is particularly apt for Lermusiaux, who has devoted his research, in part, to eliminating unlikely scenarios in ocean dynamics.

Lermusiaux leads MIT’s Multidisciplinary Simulation, Estimation, and Assimilation Systems (MSEAS) group, which develops models and assimilation schemes to better predict ocean behavior for a wide range of applications — from planning the most efficient paths for underwater robots to anticipating how bioluminescent organisms will affect sonar propagation.

The group focuses, in part, on modeling coastal areas, which Lermusiaux describes as a veritable sea of complexity.

“In coastal areas, things can get more mixed up than in the open ocean,” says Lermusiaux, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “You have fronts and eddies, currents and jets, and the effects of winds, the seabed and the Earth’s rotation. There is a lot of coastal ocean in the world, and it’s very dynamic."

Working hard for fun

The concept of fluid dynamics was of early interest to Lermusiaux, who remembers learning of the Coriolis effect — the inertial force created by the Earth’s rotation — in a high school geography class.

“The teacher started explaining with an apple, and I still vividly remember that part, and thought it was fascinating how these forces would appear,” he recalls.

Lermusiaux grew up in Liège, Belgium, in a family of scientists. His father is a nuclear engineer, his mother a geography professor, and his sister an architect. The family often went along on his mother’s field trips, and took countless vacation detours to visit natural sites and manmade systems, including old ruins and architectural relics, following the family mantra: “It needs to be seen."

His father comes from a long line of farmers, dating back five generations — a lineage that may have rubbed off on Lermusiaux, who spent many of his weekends and holidays working at a local farm with a friend.

“We’d get up very early in the morning, and they’d do a very good breakfast of eggs and bacon, and you were almost like a son of the family,” Lermusiaux says. “We’d show up, work very hard, and we’d stink by the end of the day. But it didn’t seem like work to us — it was fun.”

When it came time to decide on a path after graduating with an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Liège University, Lermusiaux recalls broaching the subject of graduate studies abroad over the dinner table. Not long after, he headed across the Atlantic to Harvard University to pursue a PhD in engineering science.

Going coastal

For his thesis, Lermusiaux worked to whittle down the uncertainty in ocean modeling. At the time, ocean data were relatively limited, and samples came with some uncertainty. As a result, approximate models initialized using that fuzzy data could lead to widely varying predictions. Lermusiaux looked for ways to characterize and predict uncertainty, and for ways to combine models with multiple data sets to reduce this uncertainty. He developed a data-assimilation method and computational schemes that produced better estimates of, and furthered understanding of, ocean dynamics. His work came at a pivotal time in ocean engineering. 



“It was the end of the Cold War, and people were looking less at the deep ocean, and moving toward the coast,” Lermusiaux says. “It was the beginning of trying to resolve the multiple scales and the motions in the ocean that matter, as realistically as possible.”



During his time at Harvard, Lermusiaux’s work occasionally took him out to sea. On one sampling expedition, he spent three weeks aboard a NATO ship near the Faroe Islands, halfway between Norway and Iceland. The region sits along the Iceland-Faroe Ridge, where warm currents from the Atlantic meet frigid waters from the Nordic seas. The interplay between the two water masses creates extremely powerful fronts that can deflect sonar signals. (The region, in fact, is a setting for the novel “Red October,” in which a Russian submarine evades detection by hiding in the turbulent waters.) Onboard the ship, Lermusiaux analyzed data collected during the cruise and found large-scale wave modes. 



Today, he says, much of this computational engineering work can be done remotely, thanks to the Internet. Researchers can download data directly from cruise servers, and perform analyses on more powerful computers in the lab. 



Eliminating the impossible



Lermusiaux set up his own lab at the end of 2006 when, after receiving his PhD from Harvard, he accepted a faculty position at MIT. Based in the ocean science and engineering section of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, his group carries out research in mechanics, computations and control. Specifically, his group has developed and applied new methods for multiscale modeling, uncertainty quantification, Bayesian data assimilation and the guidance of autonomous vehicles. 



A specific focus has been to answer questions involving nonlinearities and multiple scales. For example, the team is modeling the dynamic marine environment in Stellwagen Bank, at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay — a rich ecological web of life forms from plankton to whales. Lermusiaux’s group uses mathematical computations to model the relationship between physical and biological processes, aiming to understand how eddies, waves and currents enhance the region’s nutrient delivery and retention. 



The group has also been looking further out to sea to study multiscale dynamics at continental shelf breaks — boundaries at which the shallow ocean floor suddenly drops off, plunging thousands of feet and giving way to much deeper waters. 



“You have fronts between the shelf water and deeper water, and that’s an important region for exchanges,” Lermusiaux explains. “However, the multiscale interactions at shelf breaks are not well understood.” 



Recently, his group has characterized the multiscale variability of internal tides in the Middle Atlantic Bight shelf break. They showed how this internal tide variability can be caused by strong wind and by direct Gulf Stream interactions.



To allow such multiscale studies, Lermusiaux’s team has adapted new ideas in computational fluid dynamics. They are developing numerical models with variable resolutions in time and space, and have also created equations that predict uncertainty in large-scale ocean systems. They then developed nonlinear Bayesian data-assimilation methods that employ these uncertainty predictions. These methods can predict the likelihood of different scenarios and combine these scenarios with actual field observations in a rigorous Bayesian fashion.  



The researchers are also applying their models to the dynamic control and planning of swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs. Increasingly, these robots are used to sample and monitor the ocean for pollution, marine populations, energy applications, and security and naval operations. With his students, Lermusiaux is developing mathematical models to determine the most efficient paths for robots to take, maintaining coordination among robots along the way. For instance, if a current is likely to flow in a certain direction, a robot may want to simply ride the wave toward its destination.  



Lermusiaux’s group is also working on schemes that guide such sensing robots toward locations that provide the most useful undersea data. Similarly, the researchers have recently integrated their work into powerful new systems that can objectively rank competing ocean models, accounting for all uncertainties. 



The key to this kind of modeling, as with much of Lermusiaux’s work, is eliminating unlikely, or impossible, scenarios. For example, determining whether a vehicle should go left or right is a numerical process of elimination, depending on certain parameters like current speed and direction — an oversimplification, compared with the incredibly complex environment which he models.
"We have made advances in numerical schemes, uncertainty prediction, data assimilation and inference, which all have applications in many engineering and scientific fields,” Lermusiaux says. “The smarter you are in combining information with model simulations, the better you can be.”

Last week, the new U.S. secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, pledged to continue his predecessor’s work in making the Department of Energy a “center of innovation,” while also highlighting projects he thought deserved more attention. Near the top of his list is a renewed emphasis on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), a technology that could prove vital to combating climate change, but is developing far too slowly, according to the International Energy Agency.

By: Steve LeVine

Environmental websites are buzzing that China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon and other heat-trapping gases, is on the cusp of breaking the persistent logjam on global climate change policy by placing an absolute cap on its carbon emissions. Beijing’s impending move, writes Grist, would show that, compared with the US, “China is either the more mature of the pair, or just majorly sucking up to Mama Earth.”

The reports are inaccurate: Seven Chinese cities are enacting experimental carbon-trading programs as of 2014, and Beijing is fast reducing how much carbon is burned per unit of GDP (known as “carbon intensity”). But China hands in Beijing and the US tell me it has made no firm decision on capping absolute emissions. (The rumor began with a May 20 report by the reputable Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald.)

Yet the hubbub underscores an expectation among environmentalists and others that Beijing is moving toward doing more to avoid the most catastrophic climate forecasts. Beijing already has ambitious goals for sharply reducing carbon intensity by 2015. Against the backdrop of rising local unhappiness with air pollution, China’s leadership has signaled the possibility of an even faster cleanup. Climate activists hope for another iterative jump by China—from a proportional approach to emissions reduction (reducing carbon intensity), to an absolutist strategy (a cap on total emissions).

“An absolute cap simply makes management simpler,” Deborah Seligsohn, a China expert at the University of California at San Diego, told me. “An intensity target depends on expected GDP, and so localities try to game it. They can’t game a cap.” That’s why a cap would be “a big deal domestically and internationally,” she said.

Since Deng Xiaoping launched China’s modern age in 1979, Beijing has prized economic growth over every other metric of success. No prominent expert believes that China’s emissions will decline this decade—David Fridley at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told me that the only scenario for such a fast reduction is economic collapse or stagnation. The only hope is that China’s emissions growth can be tapered.

Many experts wonder how Chinese leaders will enact even the goals they have set. “Achieving these targets eventually would come at considerable economic cost, and so how China will strike a balance between local air pollution, which has become dire in some places, and the cost of controlling these pollutants is still unclear,” said John Reilly, an environmental economist at MIT.

Yet self-preservation is a powerful force. The tradeoff between economic growth and cutting emissions will become less stark if China’s leaders conclude that pollution is a serious political threat. Environmentalists are betting that China’s leaders will decide that it is.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

MAY 22, 2013

As I explained earlier this week, questions related to any impact of human-driven global warming on tornadoes, while important, have almost no bearing on the challenge of reducing human vulnerability to these killer storms. The focus on the ground in Oklahoma, of course, will for years to come be on recovery and rebuilding — hopefully with more attention across the region to developing policies and practices that cut losses the next time.

The vulnerability is almost entirely the result of fast-paced, cost-cutting development patterns in tornado hot zones, and even if there were a greenhouse-tornado connection, actions that constrain greenhouse-gas emissions, while wise in the long run, would not have a substantial influence on climate patterns for decades because of inertia in the climate system.

Some climate scientists see compelling arguments for accumulating heat and added water vapor fueling the kinds of turbulent storms that spawn tornadoes. But a half century of observations in the United States show no change in tornado frequency and a declining frequency of strong tornadoes.

Does any of this mean global warming is not a serious problem? No.

It just means assertions that all weird bad weather is, in essence, our fault are not grounded in science and, as a result, end up empowering those whose prime interest appears to to be sustaining the fossil fuel era as long as possible. I was glad to see the green blog Grist acknowledge as much.

On Tuesday, I sent the following query to a range of climate scientists and other researchers focused on extreme weather and climate change:

The climate community did a great service to the country in 2006 in putting out a joint statement [from some leading researchers] on the enormous human vulnerability in coastal zones to hurricanes — setting aside questions about the role of greenhouse-driven warming in changing hurricane patterns….

In this 2011 post I proposed that climate/weather/tornado experts do a similar statement for Tornado Alley.

I’d love to see a similar statement now from meteorologists, climatologists and other specialists studying trends in tornado zones. Any takers?

Before you dive in to the resulting discussion, it’s worth reading Andrew Freedman’s helpful Climate Central piece, “Making Sense of the Moore Tornado in a Climate Context,” and a Daily Beast post by Josh Dzieza. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has posted a helpful new fact sheet, “Tornadoes, Climate Variability, and Climate Change.”

Read on for the conversation on tornadoes and global warming, with some e-mail shorthand fixed.

First, I’m posting the comments that were focused on policy, then those focused on the details of the science:

Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies, the University of Colorado:

People love to debate climate change, but I suspect that the community’s efforts are far better placed focusing attention on warnings and response. That is what will save lives and continue the really excellent job that has been done by NOAA and the National Weather Service. I’d much rather see a community statement highlighting the importance of NOAA/NWS funding!

There will always be fringe voices on all sides of the climate debate. With the basic facts related to tornadoes so widely appreciated (unlike perhaps drought, floods, hurricanes), I think that those who see climate change in every breeze are not particularly problematic or worthy of attention.

Here are some of those basic facts:

1. No long-term increase in tornadoes, especially the strongest ones.

2. A long-term decline in loss of life (the past year saw a record low total for more than a century).

3. No long-term increase in losses, hint of a decrease.

4. To date 2013 has been remarkably inactive.

5. The Moore tornado may have been the strongest one this year, bad luck had it track through a populated area (Bill Hooke brilliantly explained the issue here).

6. That said, climatology shows that Moore sits at the center of a statistical bullseye for tornado strikes for May 20th.

Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a signer of the 2006 statement):

I see the political problem with tornadoes as quite different from the hurricane problem we wrote about some years ago. To my knowledge, there are no massive subsidies to build in tornado regions, nor is insurance premium price fixing a big problem. Also, federal flood insurance is largely irrelevant to this problem. About the only thing in common is federal disaster relief, but it is hard to believe that people only build houses in huge swaths of tornado-susceptible territory because they believe they will be bailed out.

As you mention in your blog, the issues here revolve around such practical measures as safe rooms, and the role of government in mandating or subsidizing them. Perhaps one positive outcome of the latest horror story is that safe rooms in public buildings such as schools and hospitals will be mandated, given that they are apparently not all that expensive.

In my view, the data on tornadoes is so poor that it is difficult to say anything at all about observed trends, and the theoretical understanding of the relationship between severe thunderstorms in general (including hail storms) and climate is virtually non-existent. I regard this as a research failure of my profession and expect there will be a great deal more work on this in the near future. What little exists on the subject (e.g. the Trapp et al. paper from a few years ago) suggests that warming will increase the incidence of environments conducive to severe thunderstorms in the U.S. But this counts on climate models to get these factors right, and it may be premature to put much confidence in that.

Daniel Sutter, a professor of economics (focused on tornadoes), Troy University, offered the following thought after citing the Dot Earth comments of Kevin Simmons, his co-author on a recent book on tornadoes and society:

I would just add that the high cost per life saved through safe rooms which Kevin and I find in our research really indicates that tornado safety is about reducing and not eliminating risk. Safe rooms provide essentially absolute protection, but are expensive enough that many would likely judge them too expensive. We need to focus on ways to reasonably reduce risk. For instance, have engineers inspect schools and make sure the safest areas are indeed being used for shelter, or to see if there are relatively inexpensive designs that could strengthen interior hallways some.

I hate to say anything before I know for sure what the final story is from the Plaza Heights school, but the two schools yesterday appear to have provided pretty decent protection, especially since many homes around Briarwood school looked totally destroyed. Wind engineers have developed safe room designs which are great and engineering marvels, but we probably need designs that provide a good measure of safety at a portion of the price.0

Also with regard to your previous post about flimsy homes, consider the contrast between how cars and houses are marketed. Cars are sold under brand names, and we have a dual system of federal regulation of designs for safety and auto makers designing cars that are safer than federal regulations require, with certification by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Houses are mainly sold without brand names (I couldn’t tell you who built the house I own here in Alabama) with safety assurances coming through building codes. Many times we see that homes perform poorly in tornadoes or hurricanes, while during a commercial break on the Weather Channel last night there was a car ad touting the model’s crash test rating from the IIHS. If houses are indeed flimsy, there is probably a systematic reason for this.  Read more…

By Coral Davenport

Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to the triumph of ideology over reason.”

Back then, Emanuel saw the Republican Party as the political fit for a data-driven scientist. Today, the professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on climate change—particularly on how rising carbon pollution will increase the intensity of hurricanes.

In January 2012, just before South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, the Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America, one of the most influential advocacy groups in conservative politics, flew Emanuel down to meet with the GOP presidential candidates. Perhaps an unlikely prophet of doom where global warming is concerned, the coalition has begun to push Republicans to take action on climate change, out of worry that coming catastrophes could hit the next generation hard, especially the world’s poor.

The meetings didn’t take. “[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it. Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.

Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.

Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.

And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.

“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to win primary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think.

Already, the numbers tell the story. Polls show that a majority of Americans, and a plurality of Republicans, believe global warming is a problem. Concern about the issue is higher among younger voters and independents, who Republicans will need to attract if they want to win elections.

According to a pair of Gallup Polls in April, 58 percent of all Americans are worried about global warming, and 57 percent believe it is caused by human activities. Not surprisingly, responses reflect a partisan divide on the issue, but among Republicans, concern about global warming is rising. Gallup found that 75 percent of Democrats worry about climate change, compared with 59 percent of independent voters (up from 51 percent in 2010) and 40 percent of Republicans (up from 32 percent from that year).

A January poll of Republicans and Republican-leading independents conducted by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication said that a majority (52 percent) think climate change is happening; 62 percent favor taking action to combat climate change, such as taxing carbon pollution. Only 35 percent of the Republican respondents said they agree with the Republican Party’s position on climate change. (The party’s 2012 platform opposed any limits on greenhouse-gas emissions and suggested the science underlying projections of a warming climate is “uncertain.”)

Meanwhile, a March poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 69 percent of Americans believe the climate is already changing. On the more contentious question of whether fossil-fuel pollution is causing that change, the poll uncovered a generation gap: Only 28 percent of voters over age 65 accept the scientific consensus that such emissions are warming the Earth, while close to 50 percent of those under 50 accept it.

“These polls show that there are a lot of people who are inclined to vote Republican—and believe America should respond to climate change,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason program. “Republicans aren’t inclined to respond to it right now, but in the future, if they don’t take these issues seriously, they’re inclined to alienate a lot of Republican voters.”

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Mother and daughter Roberta and Michele Combs are pillars of the Religious Right. Roberta, president and CEO of the Christian Coalition America, got her start in Republican politics working with celebrated strategist Lee Atwater. Michele, who was named Young Republican of the Year in 1989 and worked as a planner for events such as George W. Bush’s inauguration, is the coalition’s communications director. With their white-blond bouffant hair, penchant for fuchsia lipstick, soft South Carolina accents, and sterling conservative bona fides, the Combses are familiar presences in the ruby-red heart of the GOP establishment.

That’s why it’s so surprising to many that they are tackling climate change. But both women see global warming, and clean air and environmental protection more broadly, as issues that tie into their core conservative mission of protecting family values.

“This is an important issue for the Republican Party,” Roberta Combs says. “At one point in time, this was a Republican issue, but Democrats took it over.”

In 2010, Roberta led a Christian Coalition push for her friend Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to sign on to a Senate climate-change bill, as the measure’s sole GOP sponsor. Graham eventually pulled his support, but thanks in part to Roberta’s pressure, he’s remained one of the few Republicans to openly acknowledge climate change and to call on his party to look for a solution. He is sticking with his position even as he prepares to face South Carolina voters for reelection next year. 

“I think the Republican Party needs to embrace an environmental agenda,” Graham says. “When you ask a Republican candidate for president, what’s your environmental platform, what do they say? We need to be able to speak to this just as quickly as to do to reforming the tax code. Younger people, people under 30, this is a huge issue for them.”

Roberta was the Christian Coalition official who persuaded Emanuel, the MIT scientist, to speak with the GOP presidential candidates in January 2012. And she continues to employ her group’s grassroots muscle to muster conservative support for Republicans like Graham who support action to combat climate change, with the hope that eventually one will sponsor a bill that can pass.

“I think the Republican Party has got to move to the center. We should never leave our base, but we’ve got to be more open-minded and look at issues more American families care about,” Roberta says. “As the electorate changes, we’re not going to win as much. It’s a different generation, and the Republican Party has got to look at all of this and broaden its agenda if they want to continue to win elections.”

Last summer, Michele launched a new group, Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, aimed at amassing grassroots support for lawmakers and legislation addressing clean energy and climate change. She is channeling her network of connections among the Christian Coalition and the Young Republicans.  

She works closely with Brian Smith, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran and the chairman of the Midwest chapter, who is also a former cochairman of the Young Republicans National Federation, a training ground for party leaders founded in 1931. The energy group is structured like the Young Republicans, with volunteers staffing city, state, and regional chapters. So far, the group has state chairs in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas—all of which have Republican governors.

Over the past year, the group has held a dozen events in those and other states. In October 2012, it sponsored a get-together in Washington for GOP congressional staff. The gatherings—mostly of young professionals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—feature hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a talk from retired Marine Gen. Richard Zilmer, who makes the case that both climate change and U.S. oil dependence are matters of national security, and that policies to cut fossil-fuel use are consistent with conservative values. Emanuel has also spoken at some of the events.

The goal, Michele says, is to build a database of voters who will, at some point, come forward to back Republican candidates who support cutting carbon pollution. “We are building a grassroots army of young conservatives around the country,” she says. “When the time comes, we’ll have the grassroots to organize around candidates or legislation, and we can activate them.”

PAYING THE PRICE

What Michele and Roberta want to do, in other words, is protect lawmakers such as Bob Inglis. Today, Republicans point to the former House member from South Carolina as the textbook tale of what happens when a red-state conservative dares to acknowledge climate change. 

Inglis, who left Congress in 2011, recalls the challenge his son, Rob, threw down to him a decade ago before he was to vote in his first election. He said, “I’ll vote for you, Dad, but you’ve got to clean up your act on the environment.’ ”

Inglis had never given much thought to the issue of climate change. As a by-the-books conservative, he says, “I accepted that if Al Gore was for it, I was against it, until my son challenged my ignorance on the subject.” Inglis spent the next few years educating himself on climate issues. He joined the House Science Committee and accompanied climate scientists on research trips to Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, where he saw firsthand the damages wrought by rising carbon pollution and warming temperatures. “I got convinced of the science,” he says, and, in 2009, Inglis cosponsored climate-change legislation with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. The bill proposed an idea that had strong backing from environmentalists, including Gore, as well as prominent conservative economists. It would create a tax on carbon pollution but use the revenue to cut payroll or income taxes.

Inglis would pay dearly for his support of the so-called carbon-tax swap. The following year, he lost his primary election to a tea-party candidate, Trey Gowdy. And Inglis knows his position on the climate was the reason. “The most enduring heresy was saying, ‘Climate change is real and we should do something about it.’ That was seen as a statement against the tribal orthodoxy.”

“But,” he says, “these heresies and orthodoxies change so quickly. Back in 2010, I was voting for immigration reform; look how that’s changed. It’s going to be like that with climate change.”

Along with the evolving politics of immigration reform, Bob and Rob Inglis also see in their situation a kinship with Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who jolted the party earlier this year when he came out in support of gay marriage. Portman changed his stance after conversations with his 21-year-old son, Will, who is gay.

“I hope there’s a parallel,” Bob Inglis says. “Rob [Portman] is a hero of mine. He loves his son. He’s willing to take risks for his son.” Unlike Inglis, Portman hasn’t yet had to face voters in a primary—and won’t until 2016. Given the rapid shift in public attitudes toward gay marriage, he may in fact suffer no repercussions. It wasn’t long ago that gay marriage served as a valuable wedge issue for the party (think George W. Bush in 2004)—much like placing limits on carbon is today. 

For the moment, however, Inglis has taken on the arduous task of bringing his party back to him. Last summer, he founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit organization based at George Mason University, focused on convincing conservatives, particularly young ones, that climate change, caused by carbon pollution, is a serious threat—and on pushing for the carbon-tax swap as a fundamentally conservative economic solution. Since last fall, Inglis and a cohort of conservative economists have made their case at a dozen events, including talks at colleges and universities in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.

Last month, 21-year-old Republican Kevin Croswhite, a senior at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., who grew up in nearby Salem (both towns lie within in the district of Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate) attended one of Inglis’s events—and was sold.

Croswhite has considered himself a conservative Republican since high school. As an economics major, he is a big believer in data: scientific, economic, and demographic. He is persuaded that his party’s rejection of the data on climate change will damage it politically.

“The country’s going to become more educated, and that’s not going to break our way, as a party, if we are denying what 90 out of 100 scientists say,” Croswhite argues. “If the scientific community is generally accepting of something, you need to trust that.”

While Combs’s and Inglis’s groups try to appeal to conservative Christians and young Republicans, another organization—the National Audubon Society—is reaching out to red-state conservatives in the West, linking the threat of climate change to the ideal of Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican conservatism, in a bid to appeal to hunters, fishers, ranchers, and other lovers of the outdoors. The venerable nonpartisan group has teamed with the Washington organization ConservAmerica to ask red-state voters to sign an “American Eagle Compact” calling for lawmakers to act on conservation policies, including climate change. The effort, which Audubon says is funded by a Texas Republican who has asked to remain anonymous, has so far garnered 55,000 signatures. 

“We’re trying to figure out how to partner with those people, so they can turn out in communities across the country, to activate them for support,” says Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold. “We want to make sure that when Republican legislators who support conservation and climate policy go home, they’re not just getting hollered at. We want to make sure they’re hearing from reasonable conservationists who say this is not a partisan issue.”

LIGHTING THE WAY

While those groups work from the bottom up to help push Washington to move on climate issues, a constellation of prominent conservative economists is bolstering the cause. These conservatives include such intellectuals as Art Laffer, the former senior adviser to President Reagan; George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of State; Gregory Mankiw, who was an economic adviser to the Romney campaign and the former chief economist for George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the influential conservative think tank American Action Forum, a former head of Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers, and an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; and a host of other well-respected conservative economic thinkers.

Laffer spoke to National Journal by phone from his home in Tennessee, where he lives next door to Gore. The Reagan economist and the liberal global-warming crusader disagree on many issues but are united on the wisdom of a carbon-tax swap as good environmental and economic policy. “Al is a dear friend, and I think he’s a damned good public servant,” Laffer says. “I am ignorant-squared on climate change, but what I do believe is that the risks of reducing carbon in the environment are less than the risks of putting more carbon into the environment.”

Last year, Laffer wrote a detailed paper on how best to structure a carbon-tax swap, presumably as part of the broader tax-reform effort Congress appears to be moving toward. “What I believe in, and Al Gore believes in, is if you’re going to do a carbon tax, you need to offset it dollar-for-dollar with marginal tax reduction on income or employment,” he says. “Anyone who goes through what I just went through, they’ll agree with me. I’ve had more experience than anyone in the financial thinking on this.”

At the beginning of this Congress, a group of Republican lawmakers, along with a few coal-state Democrats, sponsored a measure that vowed they would never back a carbon tax, and given the antitax mood in Washington, prospects for such a tax appear dim. Still, both opponents and proponents concede that the idea will certainly be on the table if Congress makes a serious attempt at tax reform in the coming years.

Laffer said that as with so many of the policies he’s proposed before, the time will ripen for a carbon tax as it moves from impossible to inevitable. “My policies are always the North Star,” he says. “Right now, this is viewed as a third-order problem. But if we take over in 2016, this will have huge traction.”

Laffer spent last year promoting the idea on college campuses. The climate-change advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet flew Holtz-Eakin to New Hampshire to participate in living-room chats with voters about the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

In March, Schultz went to Capitol Hill to talk about climate change and push the carbon tax to congressional aides. In a standing-room-only gathering in the Rayburn House Office Building, he argued, “Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican genes; we’ve been the guys who did it.… My proposal is to have a revenue-neutral carbon tax.” Schultz got a standing ovation. Among the audience were staffers from the offices of Republican Reps. Phil Roe of Tennessee, Billy Long of Missouri, and Randy Neugebauer of Texas—ranked as the most conservative member of the House in a 2011 NJ survey.

A SLEEPING GIANT

It’s long been taken as a truism that the powerful oil lobby is the reason nothing happens on climate change in Washington. For many years, that was indeed true. In particular, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company and a major contributor to Republican candidates, was associated with a campaign to fuel skepticism about climate science. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil contributed more than $600,000 to the Heartland Institute, a well-known nonprofit group that holds conferences and publishes books aimed at debunking the science of climate change. Exxon Mobil’s support of Heartland made sense. The oil company stood to take a financial hit from “cap-and-trade” climate-change proposals that would have priced carbon pollution from oil.

For a number of reasons, that equation is changing. Exxon Mobil has ended its support of Heartland’s agenda. It’s not that the oil giant has had a green awakening; it’s just that a series of internal changes have positioned the company to profit from at least some policies that price carbon emissions.

In 2010, Exxon Mobil bought the natural-gas company XTO Energy, which transformed the venerable oil producer into the world’s largest natural-gas producer. Around the same time, the company began making a noticeable shift in its climate policy. The reason: Natural gas, which is used to generate electricity, is the lowest-polluting fossil fuel, emitting just half of the greenhouse gases as coal, the world’s top electricity source. In the event of a tax on carbon pollution, demand for coal-fired electricity would freeze, while markets for natural gas would explode.

Every year, Exxon Mobil puts out a widely read report with projections on the global state of energy development. The most recent one included the assumption of a future price on carbon and a corresponding surge in natural-gas consumption. “We assume there’s going to be a price on carbon in the future, and that assumption drives our investment strategy,” says company spokesman Alan Jeffers.

And the position on climate change at Exxon Mobil that once helped fund the Heartland conferences? “We have the same concerns about climate change as everyone. The risk of climate change exists; it’s caused by more carbon in the atmosphere; the risk is growing; and there’s broad scientific and policy consensus on this,” Jeffers says.

In 2010, during Senate negotiations on the cap-and-trade bill, Exxon Mobil told the White House that it wouldn’t back that bill, but it would support legislation with a straight carbon tax, ideally, a carbon-tax swap along the lines of what Inglis and Laffer propose. Ultimately, of course, all of those attempts failed. And, today, Exxon Mobil is not actively lobbying for the tax. The company’s position remains the same, though, Jeffers says. “Our approach has been, if public policymakers have decided they want to put a price on carbon, we see a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most efficient way to do that.”

In the 2012 campaign, Exxon Mobil gave $2.7 million in political contributions, with 88 percent going to Republicans. One of the world’s biggest and most profitable oil companies—a lobbying powerhouse and major influence in GOP politics, particularly in deep-red oil states—has accepted the science of climate change and figured out how to profit from a carbon-price policy. While Exxon Mobil won’t be leading the green revolution, its shift could make a difference in the way many Republicans approach the issue.

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

For now, however, no prominent Republican running for office in the next few years will want to get anywhere near a carbon-tax proposal, or even talk about climate change. While the rift in the party over global warming is becoming increasingly evident, most Republicans feel much more secure on the side that denies the problem.

That was made abundantly plain during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, the annual Washington gathering that the GOP base uses to anoint its future leaders. Two leading speakers this year were Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush, both of Florida, the state that scientists such as Kerry Emanuel warn is the most vulnerable to devastation from intensified hurricanes in the coming years.

Rubio was the undisputed star attraction, and his keynote speech sparked some of the loudest cheers when he denounced climate science in the context of condemning abortion.

“The people who are actually closed-minded in American politics are the people who love to preach about the certainty of science with regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception,” Rubio said. A month earlier, in his response to President Obama’s State of the Union, Rubio had said, “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, [Obama] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.”

Bush’s CPAC speech had a decidedly different tone. He castigated his party for espousing hard-right views. “Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, antiwoman, antiscience, antigay, anti-worker … and the list goes on,” he said. “Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our party.”

Bush did not specifically mention climate change, although many on both sides of the aisle interpreted his remark about science as a signal that he’d be open to addressing the issue. Pundits praised the speech, but it was not a hit with his party. Bush spoke to a quiet room with a fair number of empty seats. Many in the audience members were checking their mobile devices. When he finished, Bush was met with a polite, modest smattering of applause. (Another Republican who has signaled support for climate-change legislation, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, wasn’t even invited to CPAC.)

At 41, Rubio personifies the next generation of Republican leadership, while Bush represents an older, perhaps out-of-date moderate mind-set—which means the party may very well be heading in the wrong direction when it comes to embracing climate science. Rubio’s view is likely to remain the mainstream one in the party in the short term, thanks to tea-party groups such as Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate.

Over the last several years, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the fossil-fuel industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations. The group spent $36 million to influence the 2012 elections.

“We’ve been having this debate with the Left for 10 years, and we welcome having the debate with these new groups. If there are groups who want to do a niche effort with the Republican electorate, we’ll win that debate,” says the group’s president, Tim Phillips. He’s not worried that organizations such as Combs’s Christian Coalition or economists such as Laffer will influence lawmakers—because AFP would hit any such candidate with an all-out negative campaign. “Let them bring a carbon tax on. They know it’s political death for them to bring this forward on their own.” 

There’s no denying the political power of groups like Americans for Prosperity. Still, despite its massive wealth, the super PAC failed to achieve either of its two chief political goals of 2012—unseating President Obama and claiming the Senate majority for Republicans.

The goal of grassroots efforts is to persuade Republicans that they’ll be rewarded if they take a stand in support of climate action—and that they could doom their party to minority status if they don’t. Advocates in the GOP realize that it’s too early and too fraught for Republicans seeking reelection to sound the alarm over the changing climate.

But out of sight on Capitol Hill, staffers say, conversations are taking place about how to go about doing that—eventually. “Most Republicans say the same thing behind closed doors: ‘Of course, I get that the climate is changing, of course I get that we need to do something—but I need to get reelected.’ Somehow they’re going to have to find a safe place on this,” says the Audubon Society’s Yarnold.

“We’re trying to get them to come out of the climate closet,” he says. “There’s no question they’re leaving votes on the table because of this. And they know it.”