Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, argues that there are few issues in American politics for which there is truly a public consensus, but some of the president’s energy proposals may have achieved just that.

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Chait/Foer: Why the GOP Has Gone Loony

• Inside the Obamacare Laboratory: Have Democrats Learned the Right Lessons from Massachusetts? by Jonathan Cohn
• Previewing Obama’s Asia Visit: Why He Has a Rare Chance to Improve U.S.-Japan Relations, by R.

This past Saturday the Washington Post ran a detailed assessment of the stimulus funding related to energy-efficiency grants.

From a new cover story on Sarah Palin by Weekly Standard hack Matthew Continetti:

Last week, when Joe Biden traveled to upstate New York to campaign for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens, the vice president took aim at Sarah Palin. "The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'drill, baby, drill,' " Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'drill, baby, drill.' "

Yesterday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted to report out climate legislation, with ten Democrats voting yes, one Democrat (Montana’s Sen. Baucus) voting no, and all of the Republicans boycotting. If you look at the vote tally (using Project Vulcan data), you find that the states of senators voting "no" emitted 29.4 tonnes of carbon per capita, and the states of "yes" voters emitted 13.3 tonnes per capita, compared with a national average of 20.9 tonnes per capita.

What do you think? Does this mean that the likely impact of cap-and-trade legislation on the members’ states influenced their votes? We would say it does, as we implied in a post we put up the other day on the household costs by a bill by metro. However, Matthew Yglesias would likely disagree, going by his response to our previous examination of this issue.

Matt doesn’t think representatives from metros (or states) with higher carbon emissions are less likely to support cap-and-trade. Instead, he argues that “the primary driver of the politics of climate change is general ideological factors, followed by the interests of energy producers rather than consumers.” That is, he thinks that industry opposition to carbon legislation is a stronger motivator of "no" votes than consumer opposition—an interesting theory that we can almost buy. Did you see all those anti-climate bill industry ads during the World Series?

• The UN Report on Gaza Is Biased, Shoddy, and Unrealistic. But Israel Must Deal Honestly With Its Own Failures. by Moshe Halbertal
• Bush is a Genius! Health Reform is Dead!

• Obama’s Sudan Envoy Is an Embarrassment. Fire Him. by The Editors
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Bernard Avishai, the author of two excellent, but sometimes misunderstood, books on Israel and on Zionism,  is a professor of business at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and on top of the transformation of the older industrial into a new cyber-industrial economy. Avishai has written a very important

In an interview with The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert, Al Gore made an interesting point I hadn't seen elsewhere (it's that last paragraph there):

• Election Analysis: The Center Proves to Be the Most Popular Place in American Politics by John B.

One of the big business stories today was that Warren Buffett is planning to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which boasts one of the largest freight-rail networks in the country. Buffett told reporters that the move was "an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States." That's certainly encouraging.

Much is in question today as Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chairman Barbara Boxer tries to push ahead with work on climate-change legislation, with Republicans threatening a boycott of the markup. What is certain, however, is that cost issues—costs to the overall economy, costs to certain sectors, and costs to families—will loom huge in the coming weeks.

On the overall impact, the most recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a cap-and-trade bill will depress GDP growth 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent by 2020, though some contend legislation will actually boost growth, while others like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce foresee massive layoffs. Across sectors, several studies show varied impacts, with energy-intensive industries losing more jobs than will be created in clean energy. But we’ll leave those aside for now.

Today, we are interested in the cost impact of legislation on households, and here we are generally reassured that the newest EPA analysis, which concludes that a climate package like the one being considered by the Senate would cost the average household only around $80 to $111 per year. That seems supportable. And yet, that’s a national figure, and so it remains unsatisfying. Of course, many, many national averages obscure significant variation across America’s diverse array of metropolitan areas. Also, our 2008 research that ranked the carbon emissions of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, located significant variation  between the energy use and emissions of the “cleanest” and the “dirtiest” metros.

So we decided to drill down a little on the household costs for metros, somewhat as Nate Silver did at the state level, using the CBO’s household cap-trade cost-impact figures for different income groups and the Brookings carbon footprint data for metropolitan areas. (Look here to check out what we did).

Nukes, nukes, and … nukes. These days, when it comes to energy and climate change, that seems to be all Republicans want to talk about. Throughout last week's hearings on the Senate climate bill, Lamar Alexander kept interjecting that a massive ramp-up of nuclear power was the only real solution to global warming, bringing up the subject at every turn. For many of his colleagues, it's one of the few energy ideas that piques any interest at all.

• Was Creigh Deeds’s Fatal Error Being Himself? by Jason Zengerle
• Karzai vs.

Now Google is in. In compelling testimony to the Energy and Public Works Committee last week, the director of climate change and energy initiatives for the company's philanthropy (Google.org), Dan Reicher, mounted a powerful argument that the federal government should invest at least $15 billion a year of climate bill revenues in clean energy research and development. Declared Reicher:

Putting a price on carbon, while absolutely necessary, is not sufficient to address the climate problem and importantly, will not put the U.S. in the position to seize the extraordinary opportunities that will come with rebuilding to global energy economy.

And he continued:

Unfortunately, no matter how you measure it, U.S. government investment in clear energy R&D is woefully inadequate… Chairman Boxer, it is essential that Congress address this serious energy R&D short-fall by incorporating President Obama’s goal of $15 billion per year in federal energy R&D spending in final climate legislation.

Over at SolveClimate, Renee Cho reports that Massachusetts is embarking on a simple yet ingenious way to get people to conserve energy: just send them reports showing how much power they're using compared with their neighbors. This has been tried elsewhere. Last summer, Sacramento's municipal utility tried out a similar program, and energy use in the area has dropped about 2.8 percent this year.

As the world tries to cut its carbon emissions in the next few decades, natural gas will become increasingly crucial as a stopgap fuel, since it produces less CO2 pollution than coal or oil. At least, that's what the EIA thinks will happen. And the geopolitical implications of this trend are interesting.

• How Did Obama’s Unprecedented Grassroots Operation Fall Quiet So Quickly? by Lydia DePillis
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• Continue reading "Today at TNR (October 29, 2009)"

Over the last year, Japan’s long economic doldrums have been used as a cautionary lesson for stimulus spending in Washington policy circles. While there is little doubt that Japan has overspent on public works projects, it is also clear that Japan invested mainly in the same old projects: dams, roads, and airports. Today’s release of the  smart grid stimulus grants shows that the United States  does not have to repeat the Japanese experience.

Announced by President Obama during a visit to a solar energy facility in Arcadia, Fla., the grants consist of $ 3.4 billion for smart grid projects, spread across 49 states and the territory of Guam. This is three quarters of the amount announced initially in the stimulus package. The money will go directly to private companies, utilities, or equipment manufacturing. The private sector guarantees an additional $ 4.7 billion to finance 100 projects aimed at demand management and technological update of the electricity grid.

A quick look at the spatial distribution of the grants shows that most of funds will go to companies located in the top 100 metros. Two-thirds of the projects and 85 percent of the funds will be managed from these areas. They will invest most of the money in crosscutting systems, a combination of demand response programs, smart grid technologies, and appliances. A quarter of all the money will be spent on smart meters projects. The utilities in the top 100 metros will also spend $148 million on improved reliability of transmission lines.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is holding hearings this week on the new chairman’s “mark” of the draft Senate climate and energy legislation released Friday night by committee chairman Barbara Boxer and Sen. John Kerry. This document will be the starting point for the next round of debate, and with this draft, we get to see for the first time how the bill proposes to allocate the revenue it would raise through the sale of pollution allowances.

So how does it look? Well, as an earlier, less detailed draft released late last month forecasted, the new draft very much resembles the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House, which means it’s a mixed bag (and quite disturbing on at least one key point). 

On the regulatory side, the outlines are almost identical, with one exception. Like the House, Boxer and Kerry call for a cap-and-trade emissions reduction system, very much like the one the House enacted. Like the House, the senators propose a specific emissions reduction goal--one that would cut emissions by 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and so is slightly stricter than the target in Waxman-Markey. The Kerry-Boxer outline would allow Environmental Protection Agency to set its own emissions regulations for major point sources under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act while Waxman-Markey would not. But other than that, the bill largely tracks with the House approach on the regulatory side, and even the emissions goal isn’t all that much tighter than that in Waxman-Markey, as a weekend post by Dave Roberts over at Grist makes clear.

After years of stalemate, negotiations over Iran's controversial nuclear development program seemed to progress last week when an Iranian delegation in Vienna agreed to the export and modification of its low-enriched uranium. The resulting optimism did not last. Officials in Tehran demurred, insisting that they needed more time to study the proposal and could not meet Friday's deadline to ratify the agreement. While Iran's stonewalling came as a disappointment to the United States, it did not come as a surprise. Over the past month, the White House has signaled that it is preparing a new, more severe round of sanctions in case current negotiations fail. 

Over the past few days, the Internet burped up three noteworthy energy-related studies that I kept meaning to blog, but never found the time. Thankfully, that's why some visionary on the Internet invented link dumps: