More GOP lawmakers bucking their party on climate change, But if the Republican Party is undergoing a shift on climate, it is at its earliest, most incremental stage. Politico, By DAVID SIDERS. 08/19/2017
LOS ANGELES — While President Donald Trump continues to dismantle Obama-era climate policies, an unlikely surge of Republican lawmakers has begun taking steps to distance themselves from the GOP’s hard line on climate change.
The House Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan backwater when it formed early last year, has more than tripled in size since January, driven in part by Trump’s decision in June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.
And last month, 46 Republicans joined Democrats to defeat an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill that would have deleted a requirement that the Defense Department prepare for the effects of climate change.
The willingness of some Republicans to buck their party on climate change could help burnish their moderate credentials ahead of the 2018 elections. Of the 26 Republican caucus members, all but five represent districts targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee next year.
Trump may be planning to make a very bad decision on the Iran deal WP, 20 Aug 17 “……According to international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community, Iran has largely abided by the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which greatly reduced its stockpile of enriched unranium and placed strict limits on its nuclear activities. If the regime continues complying, it could be a decade or more before Iran could again threaten to become a nuclear power. Yet perversely, Mr. Trump is matching his passivity toward Iran’s regional meddling with an apparent determination to torpedo the nuclear pact.
After grudgingly certifying in July that Iran was meeting the terms of the deal — a test mandated by Congress every 90 days — Mr. Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he planned to find the regime noncompliant when the next certification is due in October. How to reach such a finding if the intelligence community judges otherwise? According to Foreign Policy, Mr. Trump ordered a group of political aides, including now- fired strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to cook up a rationale — something that presumably will be made easier by their lack of data or expertise.
The real experts puzzle over what Mr. Trump could hope to accomplish by announcing that Iran is noncompliant — other than satisfying what appears to be his compulsive urge to spoil President Barack Obama’s legacies. Without proof of Iranian noncompliance, U.S. partners in the nuclear deal, including the European Union, Russia and China, would surely refuse to support the nullification of the accord or the reimposition of sanctions. Iran might respond to decertification by resuming uranium enrichment, even if Mr. Trump did not reimpose U.S. sanctions. That would present the White House with the ugly old problem of how to stop Iranian progress toward a bomb. Could Mr. Trump credibly threaten Iran with military action even while using the threat of force against North Korea?….https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-may-be-planning-to-make-a-very-bad-decision-on-the-iran-deal/2017/08/20/1faf5642-81e2-11e7-b359-15a3617c767b_story.html?utm
if you add up those central estimates, wind and solar saved Americans around $88 billion in health and environmental costs over eight years. Not bad.
Wind and solar power are saving Americans an astounding amount of money
Not getting sick and dying from pollution is worth quite a bit, it turns out. VOX, by David Roberts @drvoxdavid@vox.com Aug 18, 2017 Wind and solar power are subsidized by just about every major country in the world, either directly or indirectly through tax breaks, mandates, and regulations.
The main rationale for these subsidies is that wind and solar produce, to use the economic term of art, “positive externalities” — benefits to society that are not captured in their market price. Specifically, wind and solar power reduce pollution, which reduces sickness, missed work days, and early deaths. Every wind farm or solar field displaces some other form of power generation (usually coal or natural gas) that would have polluted more.
Subsidies for renewables are meant to remedy this market failure, to make the market value of renewables more accurately reflect their total social value.
This raises an obvious question: Are renewable energy subsidies doing the job? That is to say, are they accurately reflecting the size and nature of the positive externalities?
That turns out to be a devilishly difficult question to answer. Quantifying renewable energy’s health and environmental benefits is super, super complicated. Happily, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab have just produced the most comprehensive attempt to date. It contains all kinds of food for thought, both in its numbers and its uncertainties.
(Quick side note: Just about every country in the world also subsidizes fossil fuels. Globally, fossil fuels receive far more subsidies than renewables, despite the lack of any policy rationale whatsoever for such subsidies. But we’ll put that aside for now.)
Here’s how much wind and solar saved in health and environmental costs
The researchers studied the health and environmental benefits of wind and solar in the US between 2007 (when the market was virtually nothing) and 2015 (after years of explosive market growth).
Specifically, they examined how much wind and solar reduced emissions of four main pollutants — sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), and carbon dioxide (CO2) — over that span of years. The goal was to understand not only the size of the health and environmental benefits, but their geographical distribution and how they have changed over time.
From 2007 to 2015, wind and solar in the US reduced SO2, NOx, and PM2.5 by 1.0, 0.6, and 0.05 million tons respectively;
reduction of those local air pollutants helped avoid 7,000 premature deaths (the central estimate in a range from 3,000 to 12,700);
those avoided deaths, along with other public health impacts, are worth a cumulative $56 billion (the central estimate in a range from $30 to $113 billion);
wind and solar also reduced CO2 emissions, to the tune of $32 billion in avoided climate costs (the central estimate in a range from $5 to $107 billion).
So, if you add up those central estimates, wind and solar saved Americans around $88 billion in health and environmental costs over eight years. Not bad.
That number is worth reflecting on, but first let’s talk a second about how they came up with it.
Uncertainties abound in measuring positive externalities
Tallying up these benefits is difficult for all sorts of reasons………
In all those steps, there are uncertainties and ranges, some having to do with the limitations of models, some having to do with the limitations of our understanding of the impacts of pollution, some having to do with difficult-to-quantify intangibles like the value of a human life.
These uncertainties explain the wide range of estimates involved: premature mortalities range from 3,000 to 12,700; local pollution impacts from $30 to $113 billion; CO2 climate impacts from $5 to $107 billion. (It’s worth saying that there are good reasons to think most SCC estimates are lowballing — certainly $5 billion is ludicrous.)……..
Wind and solar benefits vary over time and from place to place
If you dig into the paper, you find that the most interesting data has to do with the variations in benefits across regions and over time.
It’s complex, but in a nutshell, the health and environmental benefits of wind and solar vary depending on what other sources are being displaced, and how much, and when…….
Wind and solar effects also varied widely by region, because some regions have cleaner power sectors than others. In California, wind and solar are mostly displacing natural gas. In the upper Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions, which rely more heavily on coal, wind and solar have greater impact……. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/18/16160456/wind-solar-power-saving-money
The State 19th Aug 2017, SCE&G customers have already paid $1.4 billion for the SCANA nuclear power
plants boondoggle. That comes out to an average of $2,000 paid by each of
the 700,000 customers from the nine rate hikes to date.
With $27 of the average person’s power bill going to the now-abandoned project, if SCE&G
does not change this rate, that will cost the average customer an
additional $19,440 over the next 60 years — giving SCE&G a total of $13.6
billion to recover the balance of $4.9 billion it spent on the failed
project.
For the total of $21,440 that customers would pay on average for
this abandoned project, they could have purchased solar panels, thereby
reducing power consumption and obviating a need for increased generating
capacity while lowering their utility bills considerably. http://www.thestate.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article167996422.html
Even after nuclear catastrophe, SCANA execs eye bonuses, Post and Courier, BY STEVE BAILEY, 20Aug 17
So with consumers yelling for heads to roll, what is South Carolina Electric & Gas planning next? The largest stock buyback in the company’s history, which will help shareholders and bolster executive bonuses. Kevin Marsh, chief executive officer of SCANA Corp., SCE&G’s parent company, has told us that he is “deeply disappointed and sorry” the utility has decided to abandon two nuclear reactors after spending $9 billion with its partner, state-owned Santee Cooper. The company says it wants to use its share of a $2.2 billion settlement with its bankrupt contractor’s parent to avoid more rate increases….
But SCANA has said almost nothing about its plan for a big stock buyback that will be important to growth in its earning per share. And earnings per share, or EPS, will be important to Marsh and about 250 other managers if they are to keep those bonuses coming……
At the end of June, SCANA had only $91 million in cash, company reports show. Thus, the utility must generate more than $1.1 billion in excess cash over five years to complete the buyback. This cash would be generated on the backs of customers, or ratepayers, and will reward shareholders without providing any rate relief.
The buyout needs no regulatory approval, unlike the $4.9 billion SCANA is seeking to recoup for the failed reactors.
Under SCANA’s plan, ratepayers will be paying for others’ mistakes for 60 years, but earnings will be unaffected, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Addison told the analysts. ….
critics say buybacks promote short-term thinking over long-term investment in the business. Executives use buybacks to increase stock prices and boost their pay, they say.
“Combined with pressure from Wall Street, stock-based incentives make senior executives extremely motivated to do buybacks on a colossal and systemic scale,” William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, wrote in a ground-breaking Harvard Business Review article, “Profits Without Prosperity,” in 2014
Take SCANA. According to the company’s proxy statement, half of executives’ incentive pay is based on earnings per share. In 2016, for instance, Marsh and his top executives got 130 percent of their bonuses pegged to EPS because the company exceeded its target by 16 cents a share. They also got 100 percent of their bonuses tied to their personal goals, including “oversight” of the Fairfield reactors.
This is not a joke — it is right there in black and white…..
The cost of the V.C. Summer reactors has doubled, and construction is years behind schedule. Executives typically get fired for this kind of stuff, not bonuses.
But Marsh still has his job because he has protected his bosses — the shareholders — from the costs of the company’s mistakes and shifted them to customers.
After paying for abandoned nuke project, do SC consumers need a stronger advocate?, The State, BY SAMMY FRETWELL sfretwell@thestate.com AUGUST 19, 2017 COLUMBIA, SC
A state agency whose job is to look out for utility customers finds itself explaining whether it did enough to protect ratepayers from rising power bills that resulted from a bungled nuclear expansion project.
The S.C. Department of Regulatory Staff, a 71-person agency with a $13.3 million budget, is drawing scrutiny for what critics say was a tepid defense of SCE&G ratepayers who were charged about $2 billion for the costs of two new reactors. SCE&G abandoned the unfinished reactor construction project July 31 after hitting customers with nine rate increases to pay for the work.
Regulatory staff officials say they did plenty to help ratepayers. But state law also requires the department to weigh the interests of utilities against those of customers. The Office of Regulatory Staff initially supported SCE&G’s plan to charge customers through a series of rate increases…….http://www.thestate.com/news/article168181267.html
Schiff: Jury’s out on Trump’s mental stability, Politico.com , By KYLE CHENEY, 08/20/2017
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that he and his colleagues are increasingly concerned about President Donald Trump’s mental fitness.
“There are some serious issues,” Schiff said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that “the pressures of the job may only get worse.”
The California lawmaker’s comments came after he was asked by host Jake Tapper to respond to Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier’s call Tuesday to invoke the 25th Amendment, which empowers the vice president and Cabinet to remove a president who is incapable of serving. That remedy, Schiff noted, was primarily envisioned for a president who has “some kind of physical incapacitation or serious mental illness, a breakdown.”
“We’re still far from concluding that that’s the case, even though we find, many of us, his conduct anathema,” Schiff said. He added, “I don’t think we’re at a point of thinking about the 25th Amendment.”……
Schiff emphasized that colleagues on both sides of the aisle have recently questioned Trump’s stability, most notably Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who said Thursday that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”
President Trump’s Top Defense and Diplomatic Chiefs Insist There’s a Military Option for North Korea, Time, Matthew Pennington / AP, Aug 17, 2017 (WASHINGTON) — America’s diplomatic and defense chiefs sought Thursday to reinforce the threat of possible U.S. military action against North Korea after President Donald Trump’s top strategist essentially called the commander-in-chief’s warnings a bluff.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stressed after security talks with close ally Japan that the U.S. seeks a peaceful solution to the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But he said a U.S.-led campaign of economic pressure and diplomacy needs to be backed by potential military consequences.
Washington is “prepared militarily” to respond, if necessary, he said…..
North Korea’s missile launches “must stop immediately,” Tillerson said. Given the magnitude of the threat posed by the North’s weapons development, he said any diplomatic effort “has to be backed by a strong military consequence if North Korea chooses wrongly.”
“That is the message the president has wanted to send to the leadership of North Korea,” Tillerson said, “to remind the regime of what the consequences for them would be if they chose to carry out those threats.”
Trump last week pledged to answer North Korean aggression with “fire and fury.” He later tweeted that a military solution was “locked and loaded,” after leader Kim Jong Un was said to be considering a provocative launch of missiles into waters near Guam…..
Tensions have since eased somewhat since North Korea said Kim doesn’t immediately plan to fire the missiles. But fears of conflict remain as the U.S. and South Korea next week begin military drills that the North views as preparation for invasion, and as Washington seeks to stop the North’s progress toward having a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the continental United States……http://time.com/4905989/donald-trump-steve-bannon-rex-tillerson-north-korea/
Americans are afraid of war with North Korea — and of how Trump could handle it, New polls show Americans are divided on how to handle the North Korea threat , Vox, by Ella Nilsen Aug 11, 2017,
“…….New polls show a majority of Americans are afraid the US is about to wade into a war with North Korea, but are split on whether America should take military action in the face of increased threats from Pyongyang. At the same time, some of the public’s anxiety is about Trump and his off the cuff handling of the situation. Trump’s approval rating has dipped to historic lows, and Republicans and Democrats disagree sharply on whether they think the president is capable of dealing with North Korea…..
in the past month, North Korea has successfully completed an intercontinental ballistic missile test that could reach the mainland United States, and American intelligence officials say the country is nearing its goal of being able to fit a nuclear weapon on one of those long-range missiles.
And Trump hasn’t exactly been doing a lot to quell those fears. On Tuesday, Trump appeared to threaten nuclear war, vowing to respond to North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Two days later, the president doubled down, saying of his remarks, “maybe it wasn’t tough enough.” He followed that up with a Friday tweet that the US military solutions were “locked and loaded should North Korea act unwisely.”
As a result, the possibility of war is on a lot of people’s minds.
A new poll from Public Policy Polling released by Axios on Friday morning shows 82 percent of Americans say they are afraid of nuclear war with North Korea. Another poll released by Rasmussen Report on Friday showed 63 percent of voters polled believe the US is now likely to take nuclear action against Kim Jong Un.
Meanwhile, the CBS poll conducted last week revealed 72 percent of Americans were already feeling uneasy about a possible conflict, while another 26 percent said they were confident things would be resolved.
However, the majority of those polled (60 percent), were optimistic the threat from North Korea could still be contained, with another 29 percent saying they believed it required immediate military action……
Another poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs earlier this month found something similar, with a slim majority of respondents saying they supported military intervention if North Korea attacked South Korea.
The Chicago Council poll is the first time that more than half of Americans voiced support for sending in troops to help South Korea in the event of an attack. However, the same poll found Americans were still reticent to get involved in an armed conflict with North Korea and more likely to support increased sanctions instead.
Amidst the escalation, Americans still don’t have a lot of confidence in their commander in chief.
Just 35 percent of respondents to the CBS poll said they were confident in Trump’s ability to handle the North Korea threat, while 61 percent said they were uneasy. Confidence in Trump’s ability fell largely along party lines, with 76 percent of Republicans saying they were confident, and 31 percent of independents and just 10 percent of Democrats agreeing with them.
Climate change will likely wreck their livelihoods – but they still don’t buy the science
The small Louisiana town of Cameron could be the first in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels – and yet locals, 90% of whom voted for Trump, still aren’t convinced about climate change, Guardian, Shannon Sims in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, 18 Aug 17, In 50 years, the region near where I grew up, Cameron Parish in south-west Louisiana, will likely be no more. Or rather, it will exist, but it may be underwater, according to the newly published calculations of the Louisianagovernment. Coastal land loss is on the upswing, and with each hurricane that sweeps over the region, the timeline is picking up speed.
As a result, Cameron, the principal town in this 6,800-person parish (as counties are called in Louisiana), could be the first town in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels and flooding. So it’s here one would expect to feel the greatest sense of alarm over climate change and its consequences.
Instead, Cameron has earned a different kind of fame: it’s the county that, percentage-wise, voted more in favor of Trump than any other county in the US in last year’s election. Nearly 90% of the population did.
Why would some of the people most vulnerable to climate change vote for a politician skeptical of climate change’s existence? Why would people in Cameron Parish support policies that could ruin them?……..
…..”Because of the rules and regulations, it costs so much to live here.”
Many locals in Cameron repeat this phrase – “rules and regulations”. They’re referring to the strict construction rules placed on residents who wanted to return to Cameron and rebuild after Rita and Ike hit the town. As a result, all structures needed to be raised in order to qualify for hurricane insurance. The result is a humble town whose homes appear strangely grandiose: single-story modest brick houses now rest on top of large, grassy man-made hills, a kind of south Louisianacastle…….
As for her politics, Smith thinks Cameron’s residents voted for Trump because “we think he could help the oil field out, and hopefully stop the imported seafood from coming into our country so our people can make a living,” she says.
Smith, like most of the residents of Cameron, has been highly dependent on state and federal assistance programs to recover after the storms. But what if, in Trump’s push to shrink the size of the government, recovery programs are cut?
“We’d be screwed,” she says frankly. “But that doesn’t change my opinion about Trump,” she quickly adds. “Outsiders think that everybody is just looking for a handout down here, but there is hard-working people that live here. There are just not many jobs right now, especially if all you know is commercial fishing. Even if Trump cuts those programs that helped us, we gonna make it one way or another here, with or without help. Down here we survive.”…….
Vail says he’s pleased with the drawdown on environmental restrictions that Trump has instituted since taking office.
“When he took office he stopped the EPA’s Waters of the US rule, where anything that would flow into a navigable tributary would have had jurisdiction under the EPA. Well, navigable tributaries go through half the land I farm. So you’re saying a ditch I put in my field to drain the water off, then that the land comes under your jurisdiction? You can tell me when I can go into it, and what I can use as fertilizer?”………
Mr Benny’s son lets me know that their alligator hunting business has brought in a high-end clientele. He brings out a photo of a grinning Donald Trump Jr taken during an alligator hunting trip. That personal connection has helped inform Mr Benny’s politics. “I’m Donald Trump all the way,” he says with a smile.
Even though Mr Benny’s family has been directly impacted by hurricanes, and even though the state mapping agency indicates that his home will be submerged within 50 years due to coastal land loss, Mr Benny isn’t buying it.
“I don’t believe it,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t believe that the tide is gonna rise 10 feet and that the Ice Age is coming and stuff like that.” Like many of the residents here in Cameron, Mr Benny sees time on a longer horizon than others might. “I been here 75 years, you understand?,” he reminds me with gentle force. “And I’ve lived on the water and guess what? The tides still come up almost the same way, and there is no flooding. And today our front marshes aren’t underwater.”
“If you go by what the real scientists say, there’s no proof. In the last 10 years the average temperature of the world hasn’t even risen a half degree………
Theriot seems caught between her job as a science educator and her life as a longtime Cameron resident, tasked with teaching about the environment in a fiercely red town. “…….“But I think the data is incomplete. And I am still not sure about climate change. I am still researching it. I feel like I don’t have enough good sources to say yes or no on if climate change is a real thing.”
Now, from her elevated balcony overlooking the old slabs, she takes a clearer position. “I’m a big proponent of the oil industry, because that’s how my family and my community made a lot of its money. So that is my livelihood. So it is hard for me to point that finger.”….
….Dyson is not particularly concerned about the forecasts that show the coast disappearing over the coming decades. He thinks global warming is a gossipy scam……. Instead, Dyson says that what worries him most are the environmental regulations ostensibly intended to save the coast. “The laws are already there to protect the coast. And I understand Trump is not 100% environmentalist. But I think it’s a good thing to get the government out of our lives. I don’t want any more environmental regulations. I don’t want any more fishing laws. And I don’t want a lot of restrictions where people can’t make a living.”….. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/18/louisiana-climate-change-skeptics-donald-trump-support
How the U.S. Navy is Responding to Climate Change, Harvard Business Review AUGUST 18, 2017 FOREST REINHARDT AND MICHAEL TOFFEL, Harvard Business School professors, talk about how a giant, global enterprise that operates and owns assets at sea level is fighting climate change—and adapting to it. They discuss what the private sector can learn from the U.S. Navy’s scientific and sober view of the world. Reinhardt and Toffel are the authors of “MANAGING CLIMATE CHANGE: LESSONS FROM THE U.S. NAVY” in the July–August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review. “……The U.S. Navy is raising its bases, using early storm warning systems, and increasingly powering its missions with the sun, instead of fossil fuels……
FOREST REINHARDT: ………. the Navy is our primary waterborne military force. And as the planet warms, the amount of water is going to increase. That is, the area near the poles, which until quite recently has been closed to marine traffic for much if not all of the year, is going to be increasingly open as the ice melts. You think the last time the Western world really encountered a new ocean was in the early part of the 1500s, and the same kinds of opportunities and conflicts are going to exist in the Arctic.
A second reason is that climate change is potentially destabilizing to societies, especially societies which are not particularly rich and not particularly well governed. And as those societies become increasingly stressed by things like drought and storm severity, the kinds of behaviors that call the military into action are going to become more frequent, whether those are wars or internal conflicts or just need for humanitarian assistance.
MICHAEL TOFFEL: And this is why the military refers to climate change as a threat multiplier. Many have made the connection between the breakdown of societies in the Middle East, in particular in Syria, for example, to be attributed to changing rainwater and other precipitation patterns. So you see these problems right now behind the growth of ISIS. You see these problems also with the migration into Europe and Europe’s struggle with what to do with these migrants. These are examples of issues that climate scientists suggest are only going to get worse in the coming decades..…..
….The Navy also is investing in massive amounts of solar to power their bases. But it’s not motivated so much by those effects that I just mentioned the private sector is trying to claim. It’s really about, in their case, about mission readiness and the resilience of their bases. They want to be sure that as climate change occurs with more intensive storms that that’s not going to knock out the power grids that supply their bases. So they’re investing in some of these power sources because of their distributed nature—the fact that they can produce power on site and not have to rely on long distance ge
Environmentalists have long objected to calling a coal-fired carbon capture and sequestration project “clean coal,” arguing that the label is misleading because it focuses on carbon dioxide pollution while ignoring other problems like acid rain and airborne contaminants. And carbon capture projects rely on continuing fossil fuel production, because the CO2 that’s captured is sold to oil companies who pump it into aging wells to coax more oil from the ground.
Politicians nevertheless continue to use the term. “My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” President Donald Trumpsaid this spring. “We’re going to have clean coal, really clean coal.”
New Fraud Allegations Emerge at Troubled ‘Clean Coal’ Project As Southern Co. Records Multi-Billion Loss, Desmog By Sharon Kelly • Tuesday, August 8, 2017 Southern Co. is accused of fraudulently misrepresenting the prospects for its troubled “clean coal” project in Kemper County, Mississippi in several legal filings this summer.
Southern announced in late July that it was shuttering the troubled “clean coal” part of Kemper after construction ran years behind schedule and the company spent $7.5 billion on the 582 megawatt power plant — over $5 billion more than it first projected.In a lawsuit filed today, Brett Wingo, a former Southern Company engineer, alleges he warned the company’s top executives that it would not be possible to meet key construction deadlines. Management responded by retaliating against him, the complaint asserts, and Southern continued to assure investors and the public that Kemper’s schedule and budget targets would be met, then blamed unpredictable factors like the weather when those goals were missed.
Wingo’s claim that Southern misled investors by concealing construction-related problems drew national attention in a front page New York Times investigation last year. In January, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) concluded that Wingo had suffered a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment” and ordered Southern to reinstate Wingo, but the company has refused, according to a statement accompanying the lawsuit. (The case is “Brett Wingo v. The Southern Company, et al.,” Case No. 2:17-cv-01328-MHH in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division.)
A second less-noticed legal filing with Mississippi state regulators accuses Southern of misrepresenting Kemper’s prospects right from the outset, before construction even began. Those claims center on Southern’s projections for what it would cost to operate and maintain the plant once it was up and running, which the filing asserts were so low they were “indefensible”.
In an email to DeSmog, Wingo seconds those claims, saying that he believes management knew back in 2012 that its “operation and maintenance” (O&M) projections were off — but kept the accurate numbers under wraps for years.
“By hiding the true O& M costs for so long, apparently since 2012 and likely longer, Fanning basically ensured shareholders would be forced to absorb $6 billion in losses,” Wingo told DeSmog.
“In 2012, sunk costs on Kemper were only around $1 billion and the natural gas part of the plant substantially complete. It would have been a perfect time to stop a runaway train from running off the end of the tracks,” he added. “But history shows, that’s not what Fanning and Southern Company chose to do.”…….
Spending Money to Make Money
Why would a company want to build a power plant that’s too expensive to run? Part of the answer, critics say, is the way that utilities like power companies are regulated.
Because they are essentially regulated monopolies, the laws governing how utilities like power companies make money are different than most industries, as explained in a 2015 Wall Street Journal article titled “Utilities’ Profit Recipe: Spend More.”
“[U]tilities have another incentive for heavy spending; It actually boosts their bottom lines — the result of a regulatory system that turns corporate accounting on its head,” The Journal reported, explaining that as long as state-level regulators sign off on a project, regulated utilities get a fixed percentage of what they spend as a profit……..
Clean Coal?
Kemper was supposed to be an engineering feat, able to turn the world’s least efficient but most abundant form of coal, lignite coal, into a climate-friendly fuel. That’s “climate friendly” as compared to the kind of coal-burning power plants upon which the U.S. has historically relied for the bulk of its electricity……..
Environmentalists have long objected to calling a coal-fired carbon capture and sequestration project “clean coal,” arguing that the label is misleading because it focuses on carbon dioxide pollution while ignoring other problems like acid rain and airborne contaminants. And carbon capture projects rely on continuing fossil fuel production, because the CO2 that’s captured is sold to oil companies who pump it into aging wells to coax more oil from the ground.
Politicians nevertheless continue to use the term. “My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” President Donald Trumpsaid this spring. “We’re going to have clean coal, really clean coal.”
Asked about the prospects for new “clean coal” projects in general after Kemper’s shuttering, a top Department of Energy official was dubious. EIA chief Howard Gruenspecht noted the role of natural gas prices, as well as the lower price of oil, which hurts the price of carbon sold to enhance oil recovery.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially confirmed last week that 2016 was the Earth’s hottest year on record, surpassing 2015, which surpassed 2014. The NOAA had reported this unofficially back in January. What made last week’s announcement noteworthy is that the NOAA is now part of the administration of President Donald Trump, who has famously called global warming a “hoax.”
Climate change denial is getting a little tricky for the president and his fellow Republicans. Politicoreported last week that some business groups, including those allied with Charles and David Koch’s powerful interests, are pushing back against the aggressive efforts of Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt to deny human-induced climate change.
These groups would rather not argue against the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is a growing threat. They want to roll back environmental regulations anyway without getting into debates that might hurt moderate Republicans. It’s an amazingly cynical strategy: Don’t argue the evidence or address the problem. Just ignore it.
The Trump administration has another chance this week to consider the choice between deny and ignore. Friday is the deadline for the heads of the 13 federal agencies that study various aspects of climate change to sign off on a draft of the Climate Science Special Report compiled by the scientists who work for their agencies. The report is part of the quadrennial National Climate Assessment mandated by Congress in 1990.
The draft was posted on the private nonprofit Internet Archive in January at a time when scientists feared that Trump might halt all climate research. It came to light last week when The New York Times reported that some government scientists were still concerned about potential Trump administration censorship.
The 673-page report largely reflects findings of hundreds, if not thousands, of previous studies of climate change, including those of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is not surprising: Good science must be replicable.
This report concludes that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
Scientists don’t throw terms like “extremely likely” around casually. It means a 95 percent to 100 percent probability. And yet Pruitt, Trump’s chief environmental official, scoffs at the concept that carbon dioxide released by human activity is a primary cause of global warming.
The draft report ventures into the quickly evolving field of “attribution science,” suggesting that there’s a “very high level of confidence” that global warming is responsible for extreme temperatures and “high confidence” that it’s responsible for extreme precipitation.
The scientific argument is over. It’s silly to deny it. It’s shameful to know it and ignore it.
How ‘waste not, want not’ became ‘spend more, profit more’ The State, CINDI ROSS SCOPPE, 18 AUG 17, COLUMBIA, SC , IT’S GOT to be one of the toughest decisions we ever face: When do we bail?…..
Imagine you’re the chief executive officer of SCANA, the parent company of SCE&G. You’re building the first of a new generation of nuclear reactors, and almost from the start, costs are higher and progress is slower than projected. But delays and cost overruns are a standard part of any big construction project, and they’re even more likely in this case, because it’s been decades since anyone tried to build a nuclear reactor in this country.
So you don’t panic. Instead, you tell regulators the cost and time projections have increased, and ask their permission to proceed. The state Office of Regulatory Staff raises questions about some of your costs, so you reduce them, and your modification sails through the state Public Service Commission.
Then it happens again. And again. And At some point, you have to realize that you can’t keep digging the hole ever deeper. But when? As long as you stick with the project, there’s a chance that it will work out in the long run. The moment you quit, you lock in the losses.
And what would motivate you to make that gut-wrenching decision?
You’re a private-sector, regulated utility, so your job is not to protect ratepayers. They’re stuck with you, and besides, it’s the government’s job to look out for them. Your job is to protect your stockholders. And you’re doing that. Magnificently. That’s why you and your executive team keep getting those huge bonuses.
There’s this law, the Base Load Review Act, that your team convinced the Legislature to pass in 2007. It says your stockholders won’t suffer the consequences of your decisions, no matter how much you go over budget.
In fact, the more you spend, the more they profit, because they’re guaranteed a 10.25 percent return on investment. So you have no incentive to keep costs down. Just the opposite.
You have no incentive to get out unless things get so bad that it would be “imprudent” — an important legal term that can yank that profit out of your fingers — to continue. Like, say, if your prime contractor goes belly up. And your 45 percent partner bails on you.
Until that happens, invest more, profit more.
When you add this bizarre economic incentive to the natural human inclination toward inertia, it’s almost impossible not to keep sending money on the project. More than you should. Longer than you should.
That situation is not SCANA’s fault, at least not mostly. It’s the fault of our Legislature, which created that disincentive to keep costs down. Or pull the plug……
Corporations do not have an obligation to anyone except their stockholders. It is government that has an obligation to all of us. And doubly so, I would argue, when government grants a monopoly, which forces us to do business with a corporation whose interests are very different than our own.
Now, Santee Cooper is an entirely different matter. Santee Cooper does not have stockholders. Santee Cooper is an agency of the state of South Carolina. Santee Cooper’s job is to serve the people of South Carolina. Santee Cooper failed us. Miserably.
There are a number of reasons for Santee Cooper’s failure, and I promise I am eventually going to explore them more fully, but one is painfully obvious: Santee Cooper didn’t have to justify its decisions to the Office of Regulatory Staff or the Public Service Commission. It merely had to justify its decisions to … itself.
Santee Cooper’s president — who is also very well compensated, though not nearly so well as the SCANA president — merely had to convince his bosses, the board of directors, that what he was doing was OK. And his bosses? Well, the governor can’t remove them, even when they make lousy decisions.
In both cases, it was the Legislature that created the situation that allowed — even invited — the failure to be bigger than it might otherwise have been.
And in both cases, it is the Legislature that must reduce or eliminate the disincentives to public-focused decision-making, so that someone is looking out for the interests of the utility ratepayers, who are, after all, the public.
North Korea Could Unleash the Unthinkable: Nuclear War Between Russia and America, National Interest, Dave Majumdar, 18 Aug 17, In the event that North Korea tests another Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) or potentially launches an attack on the United States, the Pentagon could try to intercept those missiles with the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. However, as many analysts have pointed out, the interceptors that miss their target could reenter the Earth’s atmosphere inside Russian airspace. Such an eventuality could prove to be a serious problem unless steps are taken to address the issue now.
“You should also be aware of the concern that those interceptors fired from Alaska that miss or don’t engage an incoming North Korean ICBM(s) will continue on and reenter the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association told The National Interest.
“This carries a nontrivial risk of unintended escalation.”
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told The National Interest that the United States should open a dialogue with Russia on the issue immediately.
“Good god, yes,” Lewis said emphatically.
Olya Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed.
“We have time now to consult with Moscow, talk about plans, discuss how notification would work,” Oliker told The National Interest.
“This isn’t the rocket science part of all this.”
Indeed, in a recent op-ed, Lewis argues that an American interceptor launch could accidentally trigger a nuclear exchange if the Russians mistook such a weapon for an incoming ICBM.
“We can’t assume that Russia would realize the launch from Alaska was a missile defense interceptor rather than an ICBM. From Russia, the trajectories might appear quite similar, especially if the radar operator was under a great deal of stress or pressure,” Lewis wrote forThe Daily Beast.
“It doesn’t matter how Russia’s early warning system ought to work on paper, the reality of the Russian system in practice has been a lot less impressive.”
Joshua H. Pollack, editor of the The Nonproliferation Review and a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said that the danger is real.
“Whether they actually would enter Russian airspace is probably less important than whether they break the line of sight of Russia’s early-warning radars,” Pollack said…….
Pavel Podvig, an independent analyst based in Geneva who runs the Russian Nuclear Forces research project disagreed with Lewis and Pollack. Podvig noted that the Russian early warning system is in far better shape today than it was during the 1990s. While a GMD launch from Alaska might cause alarm, the Russian philosophy has been to essentially absorb the first initial blows before launching a retaliatory counterstrike.
“The Russian system is built to ‘absorb’ events like this,” Podvig told The National Interest……..
The Russians, however, are not too worried by the prospect of discarded American interceptors landing on their soil. However, Moscow would likely want to be consulted because the interceptors might set off Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS)……..
What is surprising to the Russians is that the United States did not install a self-destruct system on the GMD interceptors to prevent the missiles from landing where they should not……..
the United States should probably consult with Russia about the possibility of intercepting North Korean ICBMs over Moscow’s territory and set up an agreement ahead of time. But even then, during a real intercept attempt, the United States will likely have to count on Russia’s early warning system operating correctly and the Kremlin’s restraint to avoid an unintended nuclear war.
7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC – 5 From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
nuclear-news 
