Cap and trade is so passé

There’s a push on to cut those nasty Wall Street people out of climate control in the U.S. It’s called cap and dividend as in there are still permits for businesses to belch global warming gasses, but the income generated through sales of the permits mostly go back to the public. They wouldn't be traded in the Chicago marketplace specially established for that and patterned after the Mercantile Exchange there.

Every energy conference I’ve been to has provoked questions about how to curb financial speculators in the market for carbon credits. You know, those people who like to make money for nothing. (I wish I hadn’t said that because the MTV song is in my head now, probably for hours.)

Continuing. The supporters of the proposal say while energy prices will go up under any cap system, especially as the permits shrink, allowing fewer emissions. The key is consumers under the dividend version get – dividends. They would amount to about 75 percent of the income the government gets for the permits. The rest of the green would go to environmental research.

The bad news is both the passed House version of climate legislation and the proposed Senate version are cap and trade. The good news is the new proposal would limit a business’ ability to use offsets, like planting trees in Sri Lanka, to make their emission quota. And then there's that limited trading of greenhouse gas permits.

The cap and dividend proposal has a Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, as a co-sponsor, so maybe it would have some momentum since Republicans who support cap and trade are an endangered or extinct species. However, even if the Senate passes a dividend plan, they would have to negotiate with those House people who make those Wall Street people look like school kids.

Blood On My Hands

To kill or not to kill - the choice is at hand.

It's chilly out there now, but the coming freezes in the next few days have started the internal debate about the outside plants. Which ones to save and how to do it are the questions that keep popping up unbidden.

I've been known to go to ridiculous lengths like using a tarp made for a semi truck load of hay, but I'm not sure I'm up to it this season. Everything has slowed its growth to a crawl except the wild tomatoes, but there are a few flowers to take inside and they need to be in their inside clothes to look acceptable. That means repotting them.

This is a tough time of year, but it's probably time to be tough. One thing to be sort of thankful for, I didn't have time to get a fall garden in, so no lettuce, spinach or radishes to protect.

I just don't know if I'm ready to kiss goodbye my enormous hibiscus or basil tree. Arrgghh.

Maybe the weather guessers are wrong again and the 15 bedsheets I covered plants with a couple of weeks ago should come out a few more times. They kind of make it look like the yard is haunted with a scattering of ghosts.

The transition from brown to green is too hard. But you know, the more I make room for inside, the less carbon that will be floating around in there. Maybe we could have a greenhouse-gas-free Christmas. Very eco-friendly.

Mayhem on Main Street - The controller from outer space

The city of Amarillo is giving rebates up to $50 per water customer to people who buy controllers that turn their sprinkler system off when it's raining or near freezing, but Tom Ash thinks that's a "baby step."

Ash is the director of conservation for HydroPoint, a company that offers more than just a puny rain/freeze controller. They can input what plants you're growing, the slope of the yard, how much exposure to the sun there is, the soil type. Then the controller crunches the data to calculate the most efficient irrigation schedule for you.

But wait. There's more.

Just picture all the information flying through space from Earth to satellite to Earth to satellite to Earth as HydroPoint constantly collects information from the National Weather Service, other government weather observatories and private weather stations. They do some kind of way-too-complicated number work and figure out the evaporation and transpiration rates in the "micro zone" your yard is in. (That means how much water vapor is going back into the air and how much the plants are releasing in the surrounding half square mile.)

All that figuring goes into tweaking the irrigation schedule that is transmitted by satellite to the controller.

There is a monthly fee for all this high-tech aid, but Ash says you save water, but also energy to pump the water. Then there's the carbon dioxide that would have been created by the Harrington Power Station while Xcel Energy to makes the electricity to power the pumps that move the water for the house that Jack built.

Let's see, that's a win, win, lose...well, good thing I'm not doing all this high-concept calculating.

I don't know if it works, but it is an interesting idea.

Oh yeah, and you can wire a "baby-step" rain sensor in for an extra charge.

All in the family

The Center for Public Integrity reports Podesta One and Podesta Two are going head on.

Seems John Podesta, formerly known as co-chair of the Obama transition and Clinton chief of staff, is head of the Center for American Progress, and they really don’t like the term “clean coal.” In fact, they accuse the coal industry of using it to mislead in the debate about energy production, greenhouse gases and air pollution.

Then there’s lesser-known but equally well-connected Tony Podesta. The Center for Public Integrity describes him as “one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists." He's also John's brother. One of his clients? The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The coalition paid his Podesta Group lobbying firm $50,000 in the second quarter to make its case during the climate debate in the House.

One of the policy papers by the Center for American Progress lambasts ACCCE as a group of coal and utility companies just stalling on making clean coal mean something. The report says the companies made a combined profit of $57 billion in 2007 but invested only a "paltry" $3.5 billion in clean coal research over several years.

Now I could be wrong, but $3.5 billion isn't extremely paltry in my checkbook, but I get the center's point.

"Meanwhile, atmospheric greenhouse gas levels grow, ice sheets melt, hurricanes become more ferocious, and the day of reckoning for the Earth looms closer," according to the center's paper.

Even the Podestas' gotta make a buck, but there may be a "day of reckoning" in Podestaland if this climate debate thing keeps going.

Making manure green

Not by feeding too much alfalfa.

Dairy cows are big energy users, but a Texas AgriLife researcher will present a paper at the Texas Animal Manure Management Issues forum in Austin that shows they can pay their energy bills and more.

I’m not sure what will be more fun, barhopping on Sixth Street or the conference.

But I digress. Cady Engler, the researcher, looked at electrical, diesel, gasoline and natural gas usage on dairies for milking, waste management, feeding and watering. He didn’t include the energy to grow crops for feed or transporting the milk to market.

He found a wide variation in usage from one type of dairy to another, but the average was about 3.2 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

Turning manure into energy, either with bacteria to make methane or high heat to make hydrogen or both could make up to 25 kilowatt hours per day per cow.

The processes can not only make energy, in the form of heat or electricity, but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manure. They also reduce the volume of “nutrients” left to be disposed of. In ag researcher talk that means there’s less poop to spread on farm fields - up to 80 percent less.

And in places where it rains (that leaves most of the Panhandle out) and there's hills (out again) that would mean less threat of said "nutrients" ending up in a creek, then a river, then a lake, then your house. But you already got that.

Burp control for a cooler planet

Short of using a cork, there have been few answers to how to control the methane emissions from cows, but there may be at least a partial answer.

Stonyfield Farm, a supplier of organic dairy products, says it is having success developing a "Greener Cow." The idea is to alter the bovines' diets to reduce their burps which would mean less methane and less global warming, they say.

The company began feeding cows diets high in natural omega-3 sources like flax last year at Vermont dairies that supply milk to it. This supposedly "re-balances" the cows' main stomachs resulting in not only less methane, as much as 18 percent less, but less saturated fat in their milk.

So the process is good for the planet and good for you. That's right, a win/win. We love win/wins. And if it keeps the EPA off your back, it's a win/win/win. Wow.

Slimy, green and good for you

The online newsletter RenewableEnergyWorld has a nice overview of efforts to turn that slimy green stuff that grows on the sides of your pool into transportation fuels for everything from trucks to jets.

It addresses the methods to grow algae, harvest its oil for refining and what to do with what's left, the ever confusing "co-products." I started hearing that term when interviewing people about ethanol. "Don't call it byproduct, it's a co-product," they all said. That seems a lot like the military insisting Iraq is in Southwest Asia, not the Middle East.

Regardless, the article says 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas production comes from people trying to get from one place to another so new fuels could help cut production.

It also says algae produce 100 times the oil soybeans, the current choice to make biodiesel, can. Also, growing algae only takes sun, water and carbon dioxide. That doesn't sound as fun as driving a big ol' tractor all day, but if it works...

Making Green Sausage

You may not want to look too closely at this because the making of legislation or sausage can make you queasy.

Up in D.C., they're working on a greenhouse gas bill to curb the production of carbon dioxide, and there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. In the first quarter of 2009, 140 businesses or interest groups have put lobbyists into action to represent them in the creation of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act. That makes a total of 880 firms or groups with lobbyists involved, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Of course, the power companies and oil and gas interests make up more than half of those. But what the heck? There's also Google, Nike and Starbucks, to name a few of the not-so-usual suspects. Then there's the American Meat Institute ("don't outlaw cow burps"), Levi Strauss and the maker of Segways (transportation without the tailpipes).

Too much?

They would probably say never enough.

There's a lot of money involved when you start talking about selling permits to pollute, better known as cap and trade, or keeping you're friends employed in Washington. The center reports the lobbyists have multiple clients. For example, 10 lobbyist firms represent 100 businesses. That's a lot of former government officials and Capital Hill staffers at work to keep the Earth from getting all crispy.