With the Republican Part at a crossroads, The Green Conservative – that's Jim DiPeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection – schools his party in the issues it should be championing to stay relevant.

Climate Change

House Republicans are not acquitting themselves well in the battle over climate legislation. Most are playing political games rather than offering constructive ideas for improving the legislation.

But the climate issue will not go away. The science is solid and the business community is jumping on board the legislation bandwagon. As the late William F. Buckley once noted, “Conservatism implies a certain submission to reality.”

Putting a price on carbon emissions must be the centerpiece of a national climate policy. Republicans interested in working seriously on the issue could start by checking out Congressman Bob Inglis’ proposal to levy a carbon tax and return the proceeds to citizens as payroll tax reductions.

Energy Security

Republicans still not sure about climate change must care about the strategic liabilities of oil dependence and its dangerous implications for national security.

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Rising gasoline prices brings usually bring bouts of worry about "peak oil," the idea that petroleum supplies will peak and then inexorably decline, leading to price shocks.

Recent studies have stirred up similar concerns about peak coal. Stop right there. Peak coal? Why would anyone worry about peak coal? Haven't we been told that the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with a domestic supply exceeding 200 years?

Maybe not, if new information from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is on the mark. In December, USGS reported the results of its detailed look at the mammoth Gillette field in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the most productive coal region in the country.

Total coal in place is an estimated 201 billion tons, USGS estimated. That's enough to supply 182 years of domestic use, at current consumption rates.

The news goes downhill from there....

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Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the dour scolds of the environmental movement, have delivered another broadside. We are duly informed that the green bubble has burst.

Their critique says that the economic downturn has pricked the bubble, a cultural artifact inflated by hot air from liberal romantics who pine neurotically for eco-harmony.

These caricatures of environmentalists, we are told, blew up the bubble through what the authors call "positional consumption." They flaunted their Priuses, ate heirloom tomatoes, and screwed in compact fluorescent light bulbs as both penance for their consumption and as a kind of sympathetic magic intended to end the dark age of materialism.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger proclaim thus: "It has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development."

Well, OK, some greens may act and believe as they authors say, and if so, shame on them. But really ...

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As if corn isn't already getting a heapin' helpin' of federal subsidies.

Blue Dog Democrat Collin Peterson, the volatile Minnesotan who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, is throwing a tantrum about the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed standards for analyzing corn-based ethanol's life cycle greenhouse gas emissions.

Peterson says EPA's approach is unfair to corn producers. Not a word on whether handouts to corn are fair to U.S. taxpayers or to the environment.

Energy legislation passed in 2007 requires a 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions for renewable fuels produced in new facilities. The law specifies that the emissions reduction must be measured over the fuel's life cycle, from the time farmers sow the seeds until the last drops of ethanol blow up in your car's cylinders and waft their byproducts into the atmosphere. The analysis must include land-use changes tied to ethanol production that result in greenhouse gas emissions....

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What are we to make of the Waxman-Markey product that the sausage machine by the Potomac has ground out so far?

Nothing is more important for addressing climate change than putting a price on carbon and signaling to energy markets that free disposal of CO2 into the atmosphere carries costs and is not appropriate.

Waxman-Markey does that and it’s the only game in town so far, so Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack’s sole Republican vote to move the bill out of committee and keep the process moving forward was the correct decision for her to make.

Waxman-Markey does a whole lot more, however. This thing has more moving parts than an aircraft carrier, and they’re stuck together with the political duct tape known as money.

To put a clean price on carbon, auctioning emissions allowances would be the most economically rational approach. To win over coal Democrats, however, Waxman and Markey handed out free allowances like candy. You do what you have to do to get a deal, I suppose, but ...

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First, Olympia Snowe said it. Then Christine Todd Whitman. Then Colin Powell. Then Peggy Noonan. And now Tom Ridge.

These Republican worthies are saying that the Republican Party has pasted itself so hard to the far right wall of the political spectrum that it's in danger of calcifying into an angry rump that hangs on every screech from Lord Rush but has dwindling appeal for the majority of Americans who don't.

Said Tom Ridge: "My view has always been whether you're from the right or the left, liberal or conservative, that we don't demonize each other because of what they believe. And for us as a party to grow back into a majority party, we need to understand that."

Said Peggy Noonan: "A great party cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who don't accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the tent. Room should be made for them."

Said Christie Whitman: "Our democracy desperately needs two vibrant parties. And for Republicans to be that second party, we need to remind the nation of the principles for which we once stood."

One of those principles is good stewardship of our natural heritage. ...

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The Democrats have a new senator named Arlen Specter.

A few observations, both short-term and long-term:

Specter's party switch nominally will make it easier to pass a climate bill with the 60 votes necessary to shut off filibusters. If and when the interminable Minnesota Senate race finally ends with comedian Al Franken clinging to a narrow lead, the Democrats will have reached the magic number of 60. Specter, however, like other conservative Democrats from coal-dependent states, won't necessarily be a slam-dunk vote for a cap-and-trade bill unless there are free allowances or other provisions to ease cost impacts.

Specter's record on environmental issues has been, at best, fair to middlin.' He tended to follow rather than lead, and it showed in his ho-hum numbers in Republicans for Environmental Protection's annual Congressional Scorecard. With new leaders to follow, perhaps his environmental voting record will change.

Specter's switch was motivated in part by his shaky re-election prospects for next year. Even though his Senate colleagues urged Pennsylvania Republicans to back Specter instead of his reactionary primary challenger, former Congressman Pat Toomey, Specter figured that continuing his Senate career would be better served by joining with the state's expanding cadre of Democrats rather than fighting its shriveling core of increasingly doctrinaire Republicans.

Still, Specter's commentary about the GOP's lurch to the hard right is a flashing red warning light for the party that Pennsylvania's senior senator has called home for nearly half a century.

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Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were the stars of the show on the climactic final day of a mammoth climate legislation hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Gore, the thundering climate evangelist, demanded that Congress scare up the "moral courage" to pass a bill, while Gingrich, the flamboyant general of the 1994 GOP congressional takeover, scourged the bill on offer as a trillion-dollar burden on the economy.

The third guy on the marquee, former Senator John Warner, R-Virginia, kind of got lost in the molten celebrity glare thrown off by Gore and Gingrich.

But the courtly Warner – courtly must be his middle name – deserved attention too because of the resonance his message should have for conservatives.

For Republican lawmakers, who have always placed the highest priority on keeping America’s defenses strong, heeding Warner’s message that climate change is an urgent matter of national security would be far more becoming of conservative traditions than their current tack of trying to obstruct a climate bill with pseudo-science and sloganeering.

Warner, a World War II Navy veteran ...

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I'm not awarding her an Earth Day gold star. And I understand and acknowledge all the "buts" and "howevers" that will surely issue forth from her many critics.

But when Sarah Palin said the other day at an Interior Department hearing that more natural gas production could aid the cause of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, she kinda sorta had a point.

As she did when she noted that for Alaska, global warming is not a theoretical model but a reality taking place in the forests and out on the ice.

It's also worth noting that Palin said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate scenarios are among the most credible of the modeled scenarios – surely, a stick in the eye to all the diehard deniers among Palin's fans who are still claiming that global warming is caused by sunspots or that Al Gore is making the whole thing up. ...

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If ever there were a provision in federal law that has kept too many lawyers busy in too many courtrooms, it's a section in the Clean Air Act called "New Source Review."

New Source Review sounds like a cabaret act, and in a bizarre sort of way, that's how it has appeared from the outside looking in.

A Republican congressman from upstate New York, where people from both parties worry a lot about the effects of acid rain on the Adirondacks, has introduced a bill that would make the New Source Review drama go away and greatly simplify the business of cleaning up clunker coal plants.

More on Congressman John McHugh's bill in a bit. First, the background:

When the Clean Air Act was passed, one of the questions was regulatory treatment of existing power plants. Make them clean up right away or give them a pass?

New Source Review was the halfway house that Congress settled on. The old plants were given a pass, or "grandfathered" in political lingo, unless they made major modifications that resulted in significant" increases in pollution. The thinking at the time was ...

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Conservative political figures have long taken pride in their belief that they understand economics better than their free-spending, tax-loving brethren on the port side of the political spectrum.

With well fitting green eyeshades, sharp pencils, and a thorough grounding in the seminal thinking of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, et. al., they have long considered themselves the grownups when it comes to economic management.

So, why did House Minority Leader John Boehner overlook a basic principle of economics the other day in the process of misrepresenting a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study on climate cap-and-trade policies?

Here’s what happened: In a rush to declare cap-and-trade to be an unfair "light switch tax," Boehner quoted the MIT study to argue that cap-and-trade would cost each American household $3,100 per year.

Not quite, said an MIT worthy. Not even close.

Apparently, the flacks in Boehner’s office came up with the $3,100 figure by adding up the amount that the federal government would collect from selling emissions allowances from 2015 to 2050, then computing a simple annual average.

The faulty $3,100 estimate was rooted in several mistakes, John Reilly, associate director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, wrote to Boehner.

Mistake No. 1: Boehner and company confused the revenue raised by selling emissions allowances with the cost of reducing emissions, which are different concepts.

Mistake No. 2: The price of emissions allowances reflects the marginal cost of avoiding the last ton of emissions, but there are ways to reduce emissions that cost less than cutting out that last ton.

Mistake No. 3: The average cost of emissions reductions per household would depend mightily on how allowance revenues would be used. Would they be spent on residential energy efficiency incentives? Workforce retraining in coal country? Rebates for low-income households? Dividend checks for every legal resident? Those are only a few of the ideas on the table. Each individual option and combination of options would yield a different cost outcome. And Congress isn’t close to settling on an answer.

Mistake No. 4: This is the truly embarrassing one. An economics major who made a boneheaded slip-up like this would get a red “F” on his term paper. I’ll let Reilly explain the error: “The costs are borne over time and it is wrong to produce a simple average of such costs as that does not take into account the time value of money.”

The time value of money. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future. It is a foundational principle that informs financial decisions at all levels of our society, from a college kid getting a loan to buy her first car to a giant utility raising capital to build its first nuclear power plant. Congressmen in charge of the taxpayers’ dollars ought to have at least a passing familiarity with the concept.

As Reilly patiently explained, accounting for the time value of money went into MIT’s estimate that the average annual cost of cap-and-trade for a household of four works out to a net present value of $340 – some 90 percent lower than the $3,100 figure.

Costs will be one of the central issues as the debate moves forward on policies for putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Planning a future energy menu that’s lighter on carbon servings will not be cost-free, but there are multiple ways to get at the problem. Congress and the administration will need to ponder the matter carefully.

Which makes it critically important for lawmakers to ensure that their statements can pass at least a coarse screen for analytical rigor. That goes double for conservatives who profess to be the more trustworthy leaders on economic matters.

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Unqualified Republican support for fossil fuels is thought to be an axiom of American politics, ranking up there in self-evident certainty with Social Security being the third rail.

In the past week, however, slivers of daylight opened between Republican lawmakers and fossil fuel interests. It's too early to say for sure, but it's a sign that some Republican leaders are adding space in their politics for a more thoughtful, more stewardship-oriented approach to the environment.

The first occurred during the debate over the omnibus lands bill, which survived a tortuous path through a parliamentary obstacle course to pass the Senate and House with solid bipartisan majorities. The second involves the scarred mountains of Appalachia.

One of the protective measures in the omnibus lands bill withdraws 1.2 million acres of Forest Service land in the Wyoming Range from new oil and gas development. Sportsmen love the Wyoming Range for the elk, mule deer, moose and cutthroat trout that its unspoiled habitat produces in abundance.

The withdrawal was a top priority for the late Senator Craig Thomas, a Republican who died in office two years ago. His successor, Republican John Barrasso, picked up Thomas' Wyoming Range cause and ran with it.

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the march-to-his-own-drummer iconoclast who took it upon himself to block the omnibus, claimed that the Wyoming Range provision would bar access to 8.8 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas and 300 million barrels of oil.

Not so, Barrasso fired back. He quoted U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Wyoming Range holds 1.5 tcf of gas and 5 million barrels of crude. That equates to about three weeks of domestic gas usage and about 5 hours and 45 minutes of oil consumption.

Not worth it ...

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So, I received this request from Christian Science Monitor environmental blogger Eoin O'Carroll to comment on RNC Chairman Michael Steele's hypothesis that global warming is actually part of a planetary cooling process.

I responded with a carefully calibrated statement that conservatives should start talking about the conservative ethic of stewardship, and that I hope Steele wasn't trying to send a message that in the post-debacle phase of the 2008 campaign, the GOP has no need to change.

Many of the responses to my statement were the usual canards that climate skeptics dutifully recite in the interest of political correctness.

E.g., carbon dioxide is not a heat-trapping gas.

Climate change is a conspiracy fomented to raise our utility rates.

Thousands of scientists have signed a petition stating that global warming isn't occurring.

Mars is getting warmer, so it must be the sun.

Past warming episodes had natural causes, so, ipso facto, the current spate of warming must have a natural cause.

Etc. etc.

I've pondered for a long time why many people on my side of the spectrum find the idea of man-caused global warming to be threatening. True conservatives should want to act prudently to reduce risks to civilization, right?

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It's on to Plan B for S. 22, the omnibus lands bill that hit a Republican pothole and a Democratic patch of ice before fishtailing into a ditch last week in the House.

This week, the Senate plans to take up again the most important conservation bill that Congress has considered in more than a decade. More than 150 elements would protect 2 million acres of wilderness, establish three new national parks, a monument and several conservation areas, designate scenic rivers and trails, create new heritage areas, and authorize ocean research programs. There is plenty to like and very little to not.

Assuming that the Senate can pass it again with a substantial bipartisan majority, as it did in January, it's back to the House, and then possibly back to the Senate once more before the sausage machine has had its fill and sends the bill to the White House.

The legislation should have been on its way to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. last week. Instead, it fell victim to politics, thanks to ...

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