There is so much that caught my eye this week that I couldn’t make it to Friday before putting this list up.

First, on the energy policy front, I’d be remiss in not highlighting President Obama’s agreement with China with respect to carbon emissions. The internet and social media are awash in analysis and commentary on this, including ClimateWire’s analysis of what the United States must do to meet the goals, NPR’s piece on the devil being in the details, Tim McDonnell’s analysis over at Mother Jones, and, of course, you can find raging debate over on Twitter.

My initial thoughts are that the projections of new, carbon-free energy China needs to bring online to meet its goal of peak carbon by 2030 are staggering, something like the equivalent of one nuclear facility a week. In a roundabout way, this could be a win for efforts to export coal to China from the United States because of the commitment by the two countries to focus on carbon capture and storage. That focus could change the potential analysis of greenhouse gas emissions that the Washington Department of Ecology is including in its State Environmental Policy Act review of the proposed coal export terminals here in Washington.

On a related note, we now have data on how Japan responded to the Fukushima disaster two years ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, coal consumption is up in Japan as nuclear generation capacity remains offline. But, Japan also looks to be jumping into the coal technology mix–note the comments in the Bloomberg article by Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan’s trade minister, regarding the potential of Japan’s advanced coal technology to reduce U.S., China, and Japan carbon emissions by a combined 1.5 billion tons per year.

And, really switching gears, I leave you with one geeky science piece, this study using carbon and nitrogen isotopes to analyze switches in seagull diet habits in the Pacific Northwest over the past 150 years. Not surprisingly, gull diets have switched from high-protein source like herring and eulachon to human food waste and trash–resulting in lower reproductive success. Back in my science days, I shared a lab with researchers who were using these types of techniques to look at diet changes and have always found this type of research fascinating.

Lots of big ideas – think the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, abolition, fair labor standards – take years or decades from when they are first proposed to their final adoption. The fact that it takes a while to bring enough of society around to actually adopt a new idea doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea from the inception.  Other ideas arise when a problem is just beginning to emerge. They are based on the best thinking at the moment. But a couple of decades later, enough is, or should be, known about them so that a late adopter ought to be able to come to smarter decisions.  It seems to me that cap and trade as a means of reducing carbon emissions in Washington falls into that latter category.

Governor Inslee has had a task force working since last spring to develop a cap and trade program for Washington. The recent election may make that effort moot. A Republican Senate and a House that is barely Democratic are unlikely to be willing to cooperate in giving the Governor credit for bold new initiatives. They have school funding and transportation to deal with first, and any bold new plan is likely to need to have something both sides can claim as a “win.”

But in the wake of the public clearly expressing its distaste for politics in which polar opposites prefer doing nothing to doing something that is good for the public but where both sides get credit, perhaps it is time to look again at a revenue neutral carbon tax.  Recognition of the need to address climate change is not a Democratic monopoly.  When the Kyoto Protocol first proposed cap and trade in 1997, debate raged, and the United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. But while today there remain “climate change deniers,” most serious thinkers on both the right and the left increasingly recognize that reducing carbon emissions is both a moral and economic imperative. The issue of principle that divides the parties is more one of the size and scope of government than whether government must address the issue.

A revenue neutral carbon tax could be used to lower Washington’s sales and B&O taxes, thus reducing the general tax burden on individuals and businesses, which should appeal to both parties, but particularly Republicans. It places decisions about carbon reduction in the hands of consumers, without needing a significant new bureaucracy; the “market” makes the decisions. That is a structure that Republicans can embrace. So perhaps there is an approach that could allow Governor Inslee to achieve his goal of making a major commitment to addressing climate change, while also allowing Republicans to take credit for achieving their goals.

Cap and trade was first developed by the EPA as a means of reducing the sulfur emissions that were the cause of acid rain, killing forests across much of the Eastern United States. By all measures, it was successful in that task.  Because of that success, it became one of the centerpieces of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was one of the first major global efforts to combat carbon emissions at the heart of climate change.

Europe has embraced cap and trade as a means of achieving its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. The states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont have formed the “Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative” (RGGI) to cap and reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector. California has a cap and trade process in place. What each of these regions has in common, however, is that they started with a significant share of their electrical supply being generated by fossil fuels – particularly coal. Coal-powered electrical generation plants provide low hanging fruit for carbon reduction.

Europe has invested heavily in wind and solar – particularly distributed solar energy (aka, solar panels on the roofs). The New York Times recently reported that Germany will soon get nearly 30% of its electricity from sustainable sources – wind and solar. It also reported, however, that the transition to renewable power threatens to upend utility price structures, as utilities are forced to raise rates in order to pay for the coal fired plants that increasingly must be kept merely on standby for the times when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. RGGI states have succeeded in meeting their carbon reduction goals largely because the drop in natural gas prices, as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has caused natural gas supplies to skyrocket, has made it cost-effective to convert coal-fired plants to natural gas.

While fifteen years of experience with cap and trade in Europe and the Northeast have shown that it can work, it has also shown that it has costs that may not have been anticipated at the time of the Kyoto Protocol. But the key distinction when considering a cap and trade system for Washington is that Washington doesn’t get its energy from coal fired power plants. The state has made a deal to close its last coal fired power plant, in Centralia, by 2025. Nearly four and a half times as much of the state’s power comes from hydroelectricity as from fossil fuel fired electrical plants. If you add in the 18 wind projects currently operational or under construction, more than five times as much electricity in Washington comes from renewable sources as from fossil fuels. Thus Washington doesn’t have the low-hanging fruit that cap and trade has been exploiting in Europe and the Northeastern states. Coincidentally, this is also the reason that Washington will not have a problem meeting the proposed limits under EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Cap and trade also requires a considerable bureaucracy. It requires that major energy providers either reduce their carbon emissions by investing in new plant or equipment that directly reduces those emissions, or purchase carbon credits from other parties who can reduce carbon emissions more cost-effectively. Thus a steel producer in Seattle might purchase carbon credits from a landowner in the Amazon basin who agrees not to cut down a piece of the rainforest, or from a wind farm in Idaho, producing electrical power to sell onto the grid to supply electricity to California. While both of those parties selling carbon credits may be reducing carbon emissions, a bureaucracy is needed to in fact verify that the land in the Amazon basin hasn’t been harvested, or that the wind farm is operating. Cap and trade creates entire new consulting industries of organizations that trade, verify, securitize and sell emission credits. Consultants aren’t free, and their costs are passed on to consumers. There have been concerns that large-scale energy credit trading could lead to Enron-style efforts to manipulate the market that could add costs to consumers without any climate benefit.

The cap and trade system is assumed to pass its costs on to consumers of power. Of course a carbon tax passes an increased cost to the consumers as well. But while the cap and trade system puts the obligation to reduce carbon emission in the hands of the power suppliers, a carbon tax puts the choice to reduce carbon consumption on consumers. Cap and trade requires large carbon credit generating projects, while a carbon tax works by tipping the price scale in favor of lower emissions on a consumer-by-consumer basis. It will lead to more individual decisions to make minor reductions in carbon demand, rather than being focused on requiring major energy producers to make major carbon reductions. Some consumers will have more success than others in avoiding carbon use and thus carbon emissions than others. But the virtue of a revenue neutral carbon tax is that all consumers receive off-setting tax reduction in the sales and B&O tax, whether or not they can reduce their carbon emissions.

Neither cap and trade nor a carbon tax is a silver bullet for reducing carbon emissions. But in light of the recent elections, a revenue neutral carbon tax might be an example of how legislatures and governors used to work together to address major issues. Cap and trade, by contrast, is likely to result in nothing more than the hyper-political rhetoric that the electorate has said quite plainly they have had enough of.

This week’s “what we are reading” naturally has an election theme:

First, I briefly touched on the threat the Republican takeover of the Senate poses to the President’s Clean Power Plan in my reaction to the elections on Tuesday. This article over at Scientific American (reprinted from Environment & Energy Publishing) goes into much more detail on the political and legal challenges the President’s plan may be facing.

On a regional level, Earth Fix compared Oregon and Washington election results, noting that Oregon’s results shift it closer to a carbon tax. The failure of the Democrats to gain control of the Senate here in Washington is getting quite a bit of press, but Governor Inslee remains “undaunted and optimistic” despite these results. He even has come out linking a price on carbon to part of the solution for the McCleary mandate—although I’m not sure you can get that concept to pencil out (or get the concept past the Republican-majority Senate).

Shifting a bit on the climate change front, the International Energy Agency released a “sneak preview” of its upcoming Medium-Term Coal Market Report, where it concludes that China demand for coal is unlikely to peak in the next decade. This preview of the MTCMP 2014 report provides a good summary of market and economic forces that drive coal demand in China, which are particularly relevant to the Pacific Northwest given the ongoing efforts to export Powder River Basin coal through PNW ports. Demand for coal is one of the main drivers of the efforts to export coal from the United States, so this forecast, if true, suggests that the overseas demand for coal from the United States will not wane anytime soon.

Finally, a couple salmon-relevant pieces that I ran across this week. The first is this article from the Peninsula Daily News on new habitat utilization at the mouth of the Elwha River. It is remarkable to see how rapidly the river is responding to the removal of the dams, and the pictures alone are worth reviewing as they dramatically demonstrate how much sediment has come out of the Elwha drainage after the removal of both dams. And, just down the street from our offices is a massive construction project to replace the aging Seattle Seawall. Part of that project will be nearshore habitat improvements, the details of which are nicely summarized over at the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.

The election results from last night have implications for environmental law and policy that we will likely fully understand after watching how the next few years play out. On a national level, Republicans regained control of the Senate, and here in Washington, it looks like Republicans will keep control of our state Senate. Both of these developments will have dramatic implications for emerging environmental laws and policies—with some similarities between what is going on in Washington and on the national stage.

Implications for Washington State
In Washington, Republicans have enjoyed a slim majority in the state Senate. As a result, Governor Inslee and others put a tremendous amount of effort into three key races, which included California billionaire Tom Steyer spending over a million dollars in support of these efforts. Governor Inslee has pursued a very aggressive environmental agenda, including his efforts to implement cap-and-trade and potentially a clean fuels standard as part of his Clean Energy Action Plan, and his efforts to reduce toxics in the environment through new legislation. Last year’s legislative session was largely uneventful with respect to major environmental legislation, and the inability of the Governor to advance his agenda was due in no small part to the Republican majority in the state Senate. The election results haven’t changed that dynamic, as tweeted by the Governor last night:

The Governor may very well be unable to implement his agenda in the next legislative session, or he could be facing a decision about doing things in an incremental fashion in a way that finds common ground with the Republican majority in the Senate. In addition, it is worth keeping an eye on the McCleary debate (for those of you not familiar with McCleary, it involves a state Supreme Court decision ordering our legislature to increase funding of basic education). Although not an environmental matter in a direct sense, what the legislature does (or doesn’t do) with respect to McCleary will undoubtedly impact funding for other programs. Either money will be stripped from other budgets to fund the McCleary mandate, or if no advances are made, the debate around McCleary has the potential to dominate this legislative session—decreasing the time and resources that can be dedicated to passing legislation regarding environmental matters.

The National Picture
The national picture is similar, although it is perhaps a more dire situation for Obama’s environmental agenda. Like Governor Inslee, President Obama has been committed to action on climate change, a centerpiece being the Clean Power Plan that EPA proposed over the summer. EPA is also in the midst of a fairly controversial rulemaking regarding the definition of “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act. Although President Obama obviously retains the ability to continue to pursue these types of activities through executive action, the Republican control over the Senate could mean declining to fund the EPA until the President backs off of this agenda. We could also see another run at the type of legislation introduced in the House after the Clean Power Plan was announced, although Democrats in the Senate could still filibuster such efforts.

How do the national elections influence the Pacific Northwest? Governor Inslee clearly set out to be a leader on climate action and environmental issues. To the extent the election reflects a national sentiment that is growing sour on these issues, the Governor may be left to forge ahead on his own (although that is something that has never scared the Governor or people in Washington). And, like President Obama’s new thorn in his side (the Republican-controlled Senate), Governor Inslee will go into the next legislative session with a familiar thorn in his side, the still-Republican controlled state Senate.

I’ll post more analysis and reaction by others as part of a “what we are reading” update later this week.