Leveling Playing Field for Renewables Should Be Priority, Says President's Science Advisors

In November, President Obama asked his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to recommend what his strategy should be to address climate change. 

Last week, they sent President Obama a 9-page "letter report" that logically calls for both emissions reductions and adaptation.  

"Mitigation is needed to avoid a degree of climate change that would be unmanageable despite efforts to adapt. Adaptation is needed because the climate is already changing and some further
change is inevitable regardless of what is done to reduce its pace and magnitude," the letter says. 

While a national strategy such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade would be ideal it’s not possible in the current political environment, they say.

Many of their recommendations are the same as those from the environmental community: 

• Create a "National Commission on Climate Preparedness" that includes building infrastructure
   to reduce the inevitable damage from the carbon that’s already locked in;
• Create carbon emissions standards for existing power plants to continue efforts to decarbonize the economy;
• Level the playing field for clean energy and energy efficiency technologies by removing regulatory      obstacles, addressing market failures, adjusting tax policies, and providing time-limited subsidies for clean energy when appropriate;
• Sustain research on next-generation clean-energy technologies and remove obstacles for their eventual deployment;
• Establish US leadership on climate change internationally, possibly by creating a North American climate pact and by working with China;
• Conduct an initial Quadrennial Energy Review.

To level the playing field with conventional energy, they recommend broadening the tax credit for wind to include all forms of renewable energy and replacing the annual renewal with a longer time horizon of 5-10 years.

They recognize that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies would be a more economic way of achieving this leveling, but that too is proving too hard to get done politically.

Also, "Conventional energy projects have better access to low-cost capital than renewable energy projects," says the letter, and that can be fixed through changes to the tax code. All that’s necessary is to allow renewable energy projects to be financed through REITs and Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs), just as conventional energy projects are.  

Another recommendation to level the playing field is to eliminate market barriers that are preventing broad adoption of energy efficient technologies.  

While the Department of Energy and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have greatly expanded programs promoting energy efficiency in buildings and industry, they say, there are still market failures that prevent sound investments in energy-efficient buildings, appliances, and heating and cooling systems.

"A major problem is that energy efficiency and associated reductions in home operating costs are not properly valued during real estate transactions, thus limiting the opportunity to make these investments during renovations," the letter notes.

The President’s Council also talks about natural gas, favoring it because it produces fewer emissions than oil and coal, but only if "the environmental impacts of production and transport do not curtail the potential of this approach."

Currently, the un-regulated natural gas industry is spewing so much methane into the air that the industry’s emissions are right up there with coal. 

And to make it clear that the President isn’t attacking coal with this transition, which creates huge resistance from that industry, he should throw them a bone and accelerate efforts to deploy carbon capture and sequestration, providing a continued role for coal, they say. They also want nuclear energy to be pursued.

"Climate-modeling studies have demonstrated that the climate system responds above all to cumulative emissions of the longest-lived major greenhouse gas, CO2, which means that reducing total CO2 emissions to near zero as quickly as possible should be the primary aim," the letter says.

"Short-term emissions goals are important for encouraging the growth of low-carbon technologies and increasing energy efficiency. But the development of critical technologies needed to achieve deeper reductions in the long run – such as next-generation nuclear power, carbon capture, and electric and fuel-cell cars – is crucial and should not be neglected.

"A balance is needed between investments that will lower emissions in the near-term and investments, such as "game-changing" research on advanced energy technology that may have only a small effect on emissions over the next few years but will be critical to achieving success in the long run."

Here are the recommendations Pew released recently that go beyond these to include a National Clean Energy Standard, for example.

Obama posts Energy Blueprint

Also last week, President Obama unveiled his "Blueprint for a Clean and Secure Energy Future."

It begins with his idea for an Energy Security Trust, which is fine, but does little with only $2 billion over a decade. 

Then it moves to his call to double the amount of renewable energy from 2012 levels by 2020. 

To do that, he calls on Congress to make the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit permanent and refundable, while eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. 

It reiterates his commitment to "all-of-the-above" energy, congratulating his administration for "responsible oil and gas production" that has "increased each year" and expresses continued support for nuclear.

On natural gas, he supports a"streamlined system for oil and gas permits" and partnering with the private sector to "adopt natural gas and other alternative fuels in the nation’s trucking fleet." And the US will even help other countries develop their unconventional natural gas resources.  He calls for research on safe, natural gas and nuclear production. 

Here’s the "letter report" from Obama’s Science Advisors.

Here is Obama’s Blueprint: