Ah, Home Star – the legislative proposal that has eaten all my time over the last six months. What more is there to say? Creates jobs!…Slashes energy use!…Saves money!
All of that was said today and more, during a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Congressional Research Service, the Department of Energy, and a collection of business, utility, and state advocates all testified today along those lines.
Home Star is a $6 billion proposal that would create incentives for homeowners who choose to make their homes more efficient. Silver Star would offer rebates for individual measures like insulating your attic or installing an efficient new furnace (capped at $3,000 but always requiring at least a 50 percent match from homeowners), while Gold Star creates a performance path where the homeowner and their contractor figure out what measures to undertake, and the size of the incentive is determined by the percent improvement of the home’s efficiency. Gold Star incentives start at $3,000 for a 20 percent improvement and go up $1,000 for each additional 5 percent from there
From the hearing, it sounds like we all emphatically agree – it’s a great idea. We are big supporters of the program and a member of the Home Star Coalition. But the details matter.
And there are details upon details. Arguments about AFUEs, SHGCs, SEERs, and EERs and other esoteric concepts that most people don’t want to know about. But these nasty acronyms are crucial to making sure this program actually saves energy and creates jobs and doesn’t just sell a bunch of stuff with no long term benefit. In other words, we shouldn’t just spin our wheels.
Some of the issues came up during the hearing today are crucially important.
Do we need an incentive for do-it-yourself insulation?
A tough call, since this wouldn’t create jobs in installation, and the insulation, if not installed properly, may not save energy. But, as someone who likes to DIY whenever possible, I understand the appeal. I think we should be able to figure out some way to make sure the DIYers get the installation right and get the energy savings.
Should we lower all the efficiency requirements that equipment must meet to receive incentives in Silver Star to Energy Star?
NO – and I can’t say that emphatically enough. Just based on last years sales of Energy Star products, free ridership (folks who would have bought these units anyway) would suck $3 billion from the program budget and no additional energy would be saved. That’s almost 90 percent of the proposed Silver Star budget! These products will be purchased, incentive or no incentive. Bad idea.
The levels currently in the bill were negotiated with industry and advocacy groups at the table, and they thread the needle on maximum job creation and energy savings. We should leave them where they are. Cathy Zoi, DOE's Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said as much in the hearing.
Should we relax the certification requirements for contractors?
I don’t think so. We need good contractors doing the work right to actually save on energy bills. And beyond that, there are safety implications of improper installations. Contractors who aren’t certified but really understand how to improve a home will have no problem getting certified. The extra business they will get as a result of this program will more than outweigh certification costs.
Should states with existing programs play by the same rules?
Everyone wants to see Home Star build on the great work that is happening in the states, largely as a result of the Recovery Act, but we also need to make sure we have consistent standards and quality assurance everywhere. Basically, you should be able to do the work, play by the rules, and get the money whether you are in Ketchikan, Alaska or Miami, Florida.
These are all tricky issues, and we will see how the political process plays out. Home Star is tantalizingly close to being the performance-based program that will create jobs in the ailing construction industry and make American homes much more energy efficient that everyone wants to see. Home Star, in its current form, hits the bulls-eye on job creation and energy savings. It would successfully jumpstart the home retrofit industry and be the bridge to the efficiency programs that accompany comprehensive climate and energy legislation.
Of course, a whole lot more work has to be done by Congress to make sure that the program mechanics are right and the work can start as soon as possible, and that is significant. Congress, President Obama, and the broad based Home Star Coalition have worked incredibly hard to get it this far and we will all keep pushing it forward towards the finish line.
10:24 AM
In a reprise of the debate between NRDC's Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Massey Coal CEO Don Blankenship over mountaintop removal coal mining, the Washington newspaper The Hill published dueling pieces by both adversaries in today's edition. Back in January, these two squared off face-to-face in a debate held in Charleston, West Virginia. Now, their opinion pieces on the same controversial topic appear side-by-side in the paper.
(Don Blankenship, seated left, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on right, at WV debate in January. Photo by Andrea Lai/Climate Ground Zero)
Blankenship: MTR is Good
The article by Mr. Blankenship, the no-holds-barred head of the nation's fourth-largest coal mining company, is entitled: "Coal mining continues legacy of affordable energy, job source in an era of dubious ‘green’ alternatives". Blankenship dives right in by attacking his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, writing: "In 1960, West Virginians helped catapult John F. Kennedy into the White House. Fifty years later, his nephew has returned the favor with an agenda shared by environmental elitists in Washington that would accomplish nothing less than the economic cleansing of Appalachia."
Blankenship trots out the tired myth that "our coal economy depends on surface mining" and heralds strip mining as "the safest way to mine coal." He conveniently sidesteps the fact that the most extreme strip mining -- mountaintop removal -- actually stands in the way of jobs because it's heavy reliance on mechanization essentially removes the miner from the mining. Traditional underground mining requires far more miners, for far longer, than the economically expedient and more environmentally destructive decapitation of mountaintops and the dumping of mining waste into Appalachian streams. As for the safety and welfare of people, he conveniently overlooks the thousands of citizens in the Appalachian coalfields who suffer all manner of health risks and dangers at the hands of Massey's "scorched earth" approach to mining -- blasting on the mountain, deadly coal dust in the air, poisoned drinking water, overloaded coal trucks speeding down narrow, twisting roads, etc.
As might be expected from a man desperate to cling to the profits of a declining dirty industry and one who seemingly is in denial about the fact that fossil fuels are, after all, a finite resource, Blankenship portrays himself the victim of a "political crusade against coal [that] will devastate Appalachia’s economy." Naturally, it's not Massey's profits he's worried about at all, it's the fact that "the first casualties will be thousands upon thousands of good-paying jobs with good benefits. Jobs might not matter on the beaches of Hyannis Port, Mass., but they do in the hollows of West Virginia."
Kennedy: MTR is Greed
Bobby Kennedy, senior counsel for NRDC, is no wallflower himself. His counterpoint is entitled, "Poverty and tyranny central to immoral practice of mountain destruction, water and air poisoning". He sets up his argument by noting that the Appalachian forest is "the oldest and richest ecosystem north of the equator, having survived the Pleistocene ice era and provided the seed stock that reforested the continent." The kicker: "Now the Massey Energy coal company, the largest practitioner of mountaintop removal, and a few corporate cronies are accomplishing what the Pleistocene could not: flattening Appalachia’s mountains, obliterating those ancient forests and historic landscapes."
Not surprisingly, Mr. Kennedy's take on mountaintop removal is decidedly different than Blankenship's: "Using mammoth machines designed to replace human workers, and explosives with the power of a Hiroshima bomb each week, coal companies have already flattened 1.4 million acres, buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams and blown up 500 of America’s oldest mountains," Kennedy explains.
Kennedy strongly disputes industry's claim that mountaintop removal brings prosperity to the region, calling it a dirty lie. "To the contrary," Kennedy writes, "the out-of-state companies and Wall Street banks that control Appalachian coal are liquidating the resources of the region while impoverishing its residents."
He cites the example of West Virginia -- "ground zero for the plundering of Appalachia" -- as a state blessed with some of the country’s richest natural resources yet ranked as the second poorest state in the country. "Coalfield counties throughout the region have some of the highest poverty levels in the nation," Kennedy points out. He charges that mountaintop removal "is incompatible with either economic development or human habitation" and identifies once-thriving communities reduced by rapacious mining to "ghost towns dotting the coalfields." Whereas Blankenship accuses environmentalists of "economic cleansing" in Appalachia, presumably the result of regulations constricting mining operations, Kennedy accuses coal companies of engaging in "a deliberate policy of buying and closing coal towns and paying the residents to leave. Then, after a few short years of production, the companies leave too, abandoning depopulated hollows and barren moonscapes that are useless for economic development or functioning ecosystems."
Through Massey’s brand of mountaintop removal, Kennedy says Blankenship has “caused more suffering to more people in Appalachia than any other human being.” Kennedy calls this kind of mining a moral crime, as well as a "criminal enterprise", citing Massey's record-breaking $20 million fine from EPA for tens of thousands of Clean Water Act violations. "Thanks to the coal industry," writes Kennedy, "every waterway in central Appalachia is now contaminated with dangerous levels of heavy metals like mercury," as well "deadly chemicals like arsenic and selenium illegally dumped into Appalachia’s waterways."
According to Kennedy, mountaintop removal is only profitable due to huge public subsidies. For instance, he cites a study on the impact of coal on Kentucky’s state budget. It concluded that the industry generated roughly $528 million in tax revenues in 2006. "However," Kennedy notes, "placating King Coal cost the Bluegrass State $642 million to maintain thousands of miles of coal roads and other public subsidies – a net loss of $115 million annually." (By the way, that study did not even consider the public health consequences of mining or its many other externalized costs.) Aside from the economic costs of coal, Kennedy cites research on the alarming health costs of people who live in the coalfields, which exceed the economic contributions of the entire mining industry by up to $50 million annually.
Kennedy also points out that the myriad ills of mountaintop removal are in no way justified when you consider that only about 5 percent of the nation’s electric power comes from this form of mining. He concludes:
(One of the "ghost towns" mentioned by Kennedy: Lindytown, WV)
9:41 AM
A handful of lawmakers in the Senate and House have been trying to block the EPA from regulating global warming pollution. This is largely a political manuever--an effort to drain away Senate support for passing a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill.
Some say that at least Senator Rockefeller’s bill – unlike Senator Murkowski’s – does not question the science of climate change. Yet in the end, both bills would paralyze the EPA and weaken the Clean Air Act--a bedrock law that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives over its 40-year history.
You see, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate air pollutants that endanger human health and the environment. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Clean Air Act unambiguously covers all air pollutants, including greenhouse gases.
Last year, the EPA issued an endangerment finding--a conclusion that global warming pollution is hazardous to our health and the environment.
This is precisely what some lawmakers want to overturn. But if Congress gets to pick and choose which pollutants and which science-based findings it wants to enforce, then the Clean Air Act could quickly become the Dirty Air Act, rooted in political science instead medical science.
Imagine if lawmakers had blocked the Clean Air Act rule to phase lead out of gasoline. Industry leaders certainly tried, and the fight over the lead looked a lot like the current battle over global warming pollution.
It too started with an EPA endangerment finding, one that said lead in gasoline was a threat to public health. Oil companies claimed that the science wasn’t strong enough to justify the costs. Typical of industry’s scare campaign was this letter from a Gulf Oil Corporation executive to the EPA in 1972:
“Before the EPA imposes regulations that can have an adverse effect on the nation’s economy and unnecessarily waste our nation’s natural resources, there should be general agreement in the medical and scientific community of the actual need to restrict lead additives from a public health standpoint…Such agreement does not exist at this time.”
That sounds hauntingly familiar. Yet if those voices had prevailed back in the 1970s, and we delayed removing lead from gasoline for another 10 years, 300,000 more children would have had IQs below 70 and tens of thousands of adults would have suffered from heart disease, stroke, and hypertension.
Instead, the EPA moved forward with it lead rule and created the most successful program in its history--one that has been replicated around the world. Here in America, lead emissions from cars dropped by 95 percent by 1999. And while in the late 1970s, 88 percent of American children had blood lead levels surpassing the CDC’s level of concern, by 2000, only 2.2 percent of American children did.
The science on lead proved to be right, and no one doubts lead’s dangers today. But EPA acted, rightly, well before every last issue and denial was resolved. Despite the organized effort by deniers to confuse the public, the scientific consensus on the causes and severity of climate change is actually far more robust today than was the case for lead in the 1970s. The EPA was right to act then, and the EPA is right to act now.
The lead program is just one of the more famous of the Clean Air Act’s victories, but there are many others:
These are remarkable achievements--each one brought to you by the Clean Air Act. But history shows that these live-saving programs could have been thwarted by just the kind of amendments lawmakers are using today to block the EPA’s greenhouse gas rule.
NRDC is fighting these efforts to undermine the Clean Air Act. We believe the EPA must be allowed to carry out its job of regulating global warming pollution.
But we also believe that an EPA rule will only complete half the job of fighting climate change. To fully unleash innovation, offer incentives that drive down the price of clean energy, and create nearly 2 million jobs, Congress needs to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation.
But in the meantime, we can not allow the Clean Air Act to become the Dirty Air Act. Tell your lawmakers not to support any amendments that will hamper the EPA from doing its job--the job of protecting Americans from dangerous pollution.