A Very Environmental Policy Focused Day

I’m having a very interesting day on the environmental policy front. This morning I listened to a presentation by Billy PIzer (http://www.rff.org/rff/Pizer.cfm) from Resources for the Future. He, along with other analysts at RFF, have developed a model that can calculate the relative costs of carbon reduction from various policies (including renewable portfolio standards, emissions caps, and carbon taxes). He also has a new book coming out on the real value of voluntary programs called Reality Check (http://www.rff.org/rff_press/bookdetail.cfm?outputid=9410).

Smart guy. One interesting thing in his presentation was that the likely outcome of increased RPS policies would be a large reduction in natural gas usage and only a slight affect on coal. This is because coal plants serve as base loads while natural gas plants are geared toward marginal energy usage and are more easily replaced on the grid by new sources. Fascinating stuff.

Policy day continued at lunch with a great presentation on sustainable transportation planning approaches delivered by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. The presentation, entitled Win-Win Emission Reductions, was really well done and illuminated showed me some ways of thinking about transportation planning that I hadn’t considered before. While I don’t agree with everything Mr. Litman said, I think his piece is a great beginning to a more holistic approach to sustainability in urban planning. He also seems to understand that marketing has got to be a key element in any market transformation program – something that most Feds and engineers seem unable to grasp. Check out his report at http://www.vtpi.org/wwclimate.pdf.

Finally, while I’m on the subject, I’ll recommend a very interesting article I recently read by one of my colleagues here at NREL. It’s an environmental econ white paper about how the market forces of feedback and lock-in often lead us into buying inferior products. The article is focused on how this affects environmental policy, but it has more wide-spread implications for how we manage research and technology development in the Federal portfolio. Give it a read if that kind of stuff revs your engine: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy01/28513.pdf

What does the rest of the day hold? What else, more meetings at DOE! Of course, I get to meet up with Kate later so all is right in the world.