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Republicans on the Senate environment committee made good on their vow to boycott this morning's first meeting on climate change legislation, leaving Democrats to poke holes in the GOP's insistence on a new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis of the bill.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) visited the environment panel this morning to read a statement (viewable above) calling for the EPA to take more time examining the climate bill's costs while using a more negative model than the agency used in its initial analysis of the legislation, released late last month.

Voinovich left the committee room soon afterward, leaving the panel's Democrats to question David McIntosh, the EPA's associate administrator for congressional affairs, on the relative irrelevance of performing another climate bill analysis.

If the EPA were to go through that process, McIntosh told the Democrats, "you would see vanishingly small differences" between the House climate bill that passed in June -- which was given a full examination -- and the Senate's version, which nearly triples the House's investment in clean transportation.

Moreover, according to McIntosh, there is more paperwork available to the environment committee on the costs of this year's climate bill than there was in 2007, when Republicans allowed a similar cap-and-trade carbon emissions plan to proceed to consideration by the full Senate.

"It is difficult to link the motivation [for the GOP's move] to an amount of the analysis before the committee at this point in time," said McIntosh, a former adviser to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and his primary aide during the 2007 climate debate.

The environment panel's chairman, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), kept the committee's meeting open in the hopes of breaking the stalemate. No amendments can be taken up without GOP members present -- potentially derailing any plans to increase the bill's transportation funding.

"If our colleagues would join us, the amendment process would go on as long as necessary to debate" proposed tweaks from both sides of the aisle, Boxer said. "The time to do an analysis is when there's changes that will move the models. Otherwise you're wasting taxpayer dollars."

Democrats' efforts to undermine the Republican climate boycott continued even outside the environment panel. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) promised today that he would submit the upper chamber's final bill, which will be a merged product of the work of five separate committees, to the full EPA workup that the GOP is demanding.

At a press conference today, Reid likening Republicans to unwilling dance partners. "She has been extremely deliberative and very patient," Reid said of Boxer. "And so I don't know what more she can do."

Late Update: At the end of today's climate change session, Boxer revealed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which recently lost several high-profile members thanks to its criticism of the congressional climate bills -- has written to the Senate endorsing the legislative goals set out in a recent op-ed by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The Chamber's letter notably stops short of endorsing the climate legislation currently on the table in the Senate, co-written by Kerry and Boxer. Still, it could lead to a loss of political cover for the staunchest opponents of the bill and help push the GOP back to the negotiating table; how quickly that happens remains to be seen.

During his 24 years in Congress, former Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) was known for
a brand of Republicanism now considered endangered. An ardent
environmentalist and defender of objective government science, he
played a key role in drafting the acid rain limits that are serving as a model for this year’s climate change fight.

Boehlert
is returning to the Hill today, three years after his retirement from
politics, to testify on climate legislation in his capacity as
co-chairman of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s transportation project.

He
has yet to begin speaking to the Senate environment committee, but it’s
worth taking an early look at Boehlert’s remarks — which lay out a
path to bipartisan transportation reform that’s both conservative and
conservationist.

Boehlert’s testimony begins with a fact that few of
Congress’ current Republican members acknowledge: if legislators cannot
agree on a system for cutting emissions, the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) will step in under Supreme Court mandate.

"Realistically, that is the alternative: Congress or EPA taking the lead
role," Boehlert’s remarks state. "Inaction by both would be unacceptable."

Boehlert
then cites a few compelling statistics about transportation’s role in
the climate problem, noting that the sector swallows close to 70
percent of U.S. oil consumption and that 30 percent of the nation’s
carbon emissions come from shuttling its people and goods.

His
next recommendation may well sound counter-intuitive to state DOT
officials and community advocates alike — America needs to think
bigger than its traditional, locally-driven approach to transport:

Read more…

The 40-year-old National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA),
which requires the federal government to evaluate the environmental
consequences of future projects, is a valuable tool for local residents
and green groups that work to defeat highway expansions — but as Streetsblog L.A. noted earlier this year, NEPA can be an equally valuable tool for opponents of clean transportation projects.

But
the biggest NEPA flashpoint these days is whether the White House
Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) will amend its rules to require
that federally funded projects, including transportation efforts, be
evaluated for their contributions to climate change.

The Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the
International Center for Technology Assessment last year filed a
petition with CEQ seeking climate change’s inclusion in future
environmental rules, but CEQ chief Nancy Sutley has remained mum on its
fate. "I won’t tell you what the answer is because we don’t know yet,"
she told GreenWire in March.

In
the meantime, GOP senators are starting to push CEQ towards a denial of
the petition. Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), the environment committee’s senior
Republican, and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) wrote to Sutley on Thursday
requesting all documents related to the CEQ’s consideration of adding
climate change to NEPA.

The two senators made their stance
plain, lamenting that the median time required "to
complete environmental impact statements for highway projects in recent
years has been as high as 80 months" and contending that climate change
should not be considered under a "bedrock environmental statute" such
as NEPA.

As of last year, the median time for completion of NEPA review for highway projects had fallen from its high of 80 months in 2002 to 63.5 months. Moreover, the long-term transportation bill
proposed in the House by Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) would set up an
office of expedited project delivery within the U.S. DOT to ensure that
NEPA reviews and other assessments be completed without lengthy delays.

Still,
any progress on resolving NEPA compliance issues is unlikely to deter
Inhofe and Barrasso’s push to deny the pending CEQ petition. As the
battle over the Senate climate bill heats up, opponents of legislative
action are sure to use any strategy they can to prevent the Obama
administration from addressing the issue.

Check out Inhofe and Barrasso’s full letter to the CEQ after the jump.
Read more…

The Senate environment committee released new details of its climate
change legislation over the weekend, including the share of "emissions allowances"
– the revenue generated by regulating carbon in a cap-and-trade system
– that the bill would reserve for various sectors of the American
economy.

And
the release brought good news for clean transportation: The Senate has
largely tripled the share of allowances set aside by the House for
transit, inter-city rail, and other efforts to trim transport-based
emissions.

While the lower chamber of Congress gave states the option of using 1 percent
of climate revenue on transit, the Senate measure would set aside more
than 3 percent of allowances in the first two years of the
cap-and-trade system for limiting pollution from the transportation
sector.

The Senate’s beefed-up transportation language comes after a strong push by sponsors of
the so-called "CLEAN TEA" bill, which set a high-water mark of a
10-percent climate set-aside for transit, local land-use planning, and
other sustainable development projects. Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), a chief author of the "CLEAN TEA" measure, hailed the Senate’s move in a weekend statement.

My CLEAN TEA bill is a
common-sense solution to the problem that we use a gas tax to fund our
nation’s transportation system. My language in
the [Senate climate bill] directs cities and states to determine how much they can
reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation systems by
investing in driving alternatives, public transit, intercity passenger rail,
transit-oriented development, sidewalks and more. States and cities with more
ambitious plans will receive more federal funds – finally rewarding local
governments for doing the right thing.

According to the environment committee’s weekend release, the share of
Senate climate allowances reserved for clean transportation would total
3.21 percent in 2012 and 2013, before dipping to 2.35 percent in the
two subsequent years and returning to a share that ranges between 1.9
percent and 3.5 percent in future years.

But not all
emissions allowances are created equal; 1 percent of the total amount
going to clean transportation would be reserved in the early stages of
the program, thus increasing the value of those allowances relative to
the ones distributed later on. These early set-aside allowances would
also go towards reducing the federal deficit and supplementing other
high-priority programs.

Though it falls short of the "CLEAN
TEA" mark, the 3-percent set-aside represents a victory for clean
transportation advocates as well as the nation’s cities. The allowances
would be split between grants to states for reducing transport-based
emissions and transit grants — with 80 percent of the latter going to
urban areas, 10 percent going to rural areas, and 10 percent to growing
states.

Read more…

In a speech much anticipated by those tracking the D.C.
environmental debate, President Obama today took on opponents of
congressional action on climate change, decrying "naysayers" who "make
cynical claims" that ignore scientific evidence of the harm caused by
emissions.

But
"far more dangerous" than the rhetoric of climate deniers or skeptics,
Obama added, is the tendency towards cynicism about America’s chances
of ending its dependence on fossil fuels.

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Obama described a perspective that "we’re all somewhat complicit in":

It’s the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and
our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal
with this energy issue that we’re facing. And implicit in this argument
is the sense that somehow we’ve lost something important, that fighting
American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that
determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve
problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something
of the past.

I reject that argument.

Obama’s speech, which focused on building confidence in U.S. scientific
innovation and lawmakers’ efforts to find "consensus" on climate
change, sounded broader political notes that proved effective during
his campaign last year.

Still, while the president offered no shortage of hopefulness, he made few direct references to the Senate climate bill that will take
its first major step towards passage next week with a series of
environment committee hearings. Obama praised Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R-SC) for partnering this month with the Senate climate bill’s chief
sponsor, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA), on an op-ed that outlined a potential compromise approach on emissions limits.

But
the question of where the White House would stand on some of the most
contentious issues in the climate debate, including how much revenue to
set aside for clean transportation, remains unanswered. Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood suggested during the summer that the administration may not weigh in on the transport issue until climate talks reach their final stages.

Seven months after first trying
to re-brand congressional climate change legislation as an "energy
tax," Senate Republicans were back at it today with a new report and op-ed that attempts to expose the climate bill as a "$3.6 trillion gas tax."

Sens.
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Kit Bond (R-MO) gathered outside the
Capitol today, flanked by aides wearing black stickers imprinted with
the slogan "CAP & TRADE = GAS TAX," to promote a new report [PDF] that presents their "gas tax" assertions.

How
did Hutchison and Bond get to their $3.6 trillion total, which their
report calls "relatively simple and straightforward to calculate"? They
simply multiplied their estimate of how much fuel the U.S. would
consume between now and 2050 by their estimate of the per-gallon gas
price increase that would result from an economy-wide emissions cap.

Hutchison and Bond got their numbers from the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), a business group that released projections on the cost of the House climate legislation at around the same time it joined the official astro-turf lobbying campaign against the bill. The NBCC’s analysis, produced by consulting firm CRA International, is one of many competing cost estimates for the climate bill, each of them relying on different assumptions and models that claim to predict the future price of carbon under the pending legislation.

In
fact, the NBCC analysis states (in Appendix C) that it has assumed
higher CO2 allowance prices than the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) analysis of the same House climate bill, thus resulting in higher
estimates for the plan’s impact on real-world carbon prices.

What
does the EPA say about the House climate bill’s likely effect on fuel
prices? Its analysis found a 25-cent per-gallon increase by 2030, or
less than three pennies per gallon per year — small potatoes compared
to the oil price swings of recent years, as the Pew Center on Global
Climate Change pointed out.

Center for American Progress senior fellow Joe Romm has delved further into the claim, promoted by the oil industry,
that a cap on carbon emissions would increase gas prices. Using the
non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of allowance
prices, Romm found a per-gallon gas price increase similar to the EPA’s.

Still,
it’s unlikely that Hutchison and Bond would be fazed by economic models
that discredit their case. Although they told reporters at today’s
event that they support cutting carbon emissions, the first page of
their report makes clear that they dislike the very idea of more
moderate energy consumption:

Advocates of climate
change legislation want to increase the price of traditional forms of
carbon-based energy, such as coal and oil, so that consumers are forced
to respond by using less of those forms of energy. Policy-makers call
this putting a price on carbon. Economists call this sending a price
signal. The bottom line is that the price of energy will go up.

More expensive energy from climate legislation can be seen as a new national energy tax on American consumers and workers.

Long before Congress started to take the threat of climate change seriously, American mayors were already recognizing the need to decrease fossil-fuel consumption, promote efficiency, and generally create more livable places.

Scott Smith, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, recently became the 1,000th city chief to sign on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement [PDF], first ratified in 2005 as a way for localities to commit to meet the Kyoto emissions reduction targets that the Bush administration declined to endorse.

Smith's move prompted a report in this weekend's New York Times, which hailed city-level sustainability efforts such as those showcased on Capitol Hill back in July. While the nation has long been more urban than rural -- in fact, an estimated two-thirds of Americans now live in the nation's 100 biggest cities -- the Times cast some doubt on prior portrayals of cities as proportionally significant energy consumers:

“Cities occupy two percent of the world’s land mass yet contribute more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions,” begins the Clinton Initiative’s online explication of its C-40 program, which unites large cities across the globe in a commitment to reducing greenhouse gases. ...

But other researchers — including David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London — have challenged those numbers, claiming that they are at best exaggerated and in reality unknowable.

Writing in the March 2009 issue of the United Nations Human Settlements Program’s flagship magazine, Urban World, Mr. Satterthwaite and his colleague David Dodman, drawing on the most recent figures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, estimate that cities contribute somewhere between 30 and 41 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

What was mentioned but not discussed by the Times is the Conference of Mayors' report [PDF] on 16 cities that have adopted innovative strategies to cut pollution. The entire report is worth a read (though New Yorkers, San Franciscans and Portland-ites may be disappointed to find their hometowns not listed), not least because most mayors single out land use and transportation planning as central elements of their policy-making on environment and energy.

A sobering post today from the Streetsblog Network on the importance of preparing our transportation system for the effects of climate change. Megan McConville at The City Fix reports on a panel titled "Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change," hosted by the Engineers Forum on Sustainability.

The message? "We can no longer focus exclusively on avoiding the unmanageable, but must begin managing the unavoidable."

McConville writes:

Photo by WhosThisValGirl via Flickr.

Dr. George Eads of Charles River Associates discussed four impacts of climate change that will affect our nation’s transportation infrastructure:

1. Sea levels will rise, jeopardizing coastal roadways, railways, airports and transit systems.
2. An increase in the number of hot days and heat waves will influence how infrastructure withstands high temperatures.  For example, highways could experience increased rutting (the carving of deep grooves by traffic) due to softer asphalt.
3. A greater number of intense precipitation events could cause added transportation disruptions, as could more frequent strong hurricanes.
4. Finally, rising arctic temperatures could threaten ice roads and highways built on permafrost in Alaska.

Transportation professionals must act today to minimize disruptions to the nation’s transportation systems tomorrow.  First, climate change must be incorporated into decision frameworks.  Federal, state, and local governments, in collaboration with owners and operators of infrastructure, should inventory critical infrastructure, particularly in vulnerable coastal areas.  When making investment decisions, governments and private infrastructure providers should consider climate change adaptation in their long-term capital improvement plans, facility designs, maintenance practices, operations, and emergency response plans.  They should apply risk-based investment analyses that weigh the costs of adapting infrastructure against the costs of failure.

It's good to know that at least some engineers out there are thinking about these things. But how long will it take this awareness to make it to the local DOT level?

More cheery news from the network: Copenhagenize links to some great videos about the Bike Church of Asbury Park, New Jersey (originally at WalkBike Jersey, we missed it the first time around). Bike Friendly Oak Cliff has a photo of some innovative bike parking at a local tavern. And DC Bicycle Transportation Examiner has pictures of one possible solution to the bike-rail connection problem.

To understand why the climate change bill is a top priority
for urbanists, it’s crucial to understand the emissions allowances that
the legislation distributes. The allowances essentially put the "trade"
in "cap-and-trade" –
whichever industry or state government holds them can benefit from
their monetary value or use them to emit pollution under the "cap."

The ideal for many clean transportation advocates remains the so-called "CLEAN TEA"
proposal, which would set aside 10 percent of total allowances for
states to use on transit, inter-city rail, freight rail, bike-ped
projects, or any number of other plans to reduce transport-based
emissions.

The climate bill approved by the House in June, however, gave a maximum of 1 percent of allowances to clean transportation.

So how did the auto industry fare? Car companies, which have enlisted
the Obama administration’s support for a costly national transition to
electric vehicles, got 3 percent of allowances in the first several
years of the House bill to help fund production of "advanced automobiles."

Alliance
for Automobile Manufacturers spokesman Charles Territo said in an
interview that his group considered the House set-aside "fair."

"We
strongly believe that allowances or credits, in whatever form they take
… should go to the industry, particularly because we have such a big
role to play in reducing emissions," Territo said. "We’re being asked
to shoulder a great deal of emissions [cuts]."

Carmakers are pushing for a slice of the climate pie on the state level as well.

Read more…