If you’re a U.S. homeowner thinking of upgrading your heating and energy systems in the next few years, you’ll want to keep an eye on a proposal called “Recovery Through Retrofit.” (pdf file)

To answer the most important question, yes, there will be money available.

The Department of Energy today also announced $454 million in Recovery Act financing for home retrofits and energy efficiency.

Stimulus funds amounting to $390 million will go to the new “Retrofit Ramp-Up” initiative, intended to help create partnerships to deliver energy bill savings to entire neighborhoods and towns.

This is a proposed policy that just came out of the Vice Presiden’s Office.

At a Middle Class Task Force meeting earlier this year, the vice president asked the White House Council on Environmental Quality to develop a proposal for federal action to lay the groundwork for a self-sustaining home energy efficiency retrofit industry.

In response, the Council set in motion an interagency process with the Office of the Vice President, six other White House Offices and 11 departments and agencies to develop recommendations for how to use existing authority and funding to accomplish this goal.

Here’s a chance to see whether a good idea can make it all the way from proposal to policy to possible legislation and remain a good idea. That’s the way it’s theoretically supposed to work, but too often these days doesn’t. But this sis an idea that would create jobs, cut energy costs, improve people’s houses and save them money. Sounds like a no-brainer.

Here’s something to mull over before going back to business as usual on Monday morning.

A new United Nations report suggests advisors to institutional investors may end up in court if they ignore environmental and social concerns.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission may reportedly consider whether to force public companies to tell their investors about the financial and physical risks they face from climate change.

Ceres, a Boston-based network of NGOs and investors that advocates sustainable business practices, has long pressured the SEC on climate change disclosure. The chorus continues growing louder, with new calls ranging from pension funds to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and the State of New York.

A new disclosure requirement from the SEC would force companies across the country to measure their impacts, evaluate whether they are material to them, and report their findings, which could lead to a mass corporate scramble to create and analyze greenhouse gas inventories.

You can bet that if corporations are required to account for losses due to climate change and furnish information about how their business impacts the environment to prospective investors that their attitude towards fighting global warming and climate change will be a lot different than it is now.

For too long, the United States’, and the world’s for that matter, policy toward forest management has basically amounted to no tree left standing. Whether it’s the rainforests of the tropics or the hardwood forests of more temperate climes, the short-term economic gains of cutting down trees has far outweighed efforts to take a longer-term approach, and has gotten in the way of valuing the worth of forests as forests. Bit by bit, though, we’re learning just how valuable a standing forest can be.

The deep green forests of the Pacific Northwest hold great potential to increase carbon storage and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, if they are managed primarily for that purpose, new research has found.
In the complete absence of fire or timber harvest, the forests of Oregon and Northern California could theoretically almost double their carbon storage, according to scientists in the Oregon State University College of Forestry.

The authors recognized that a complete absence of disturbance is unrealistic, so their estimates were based on average conditions up until now that include variation in forest biomass, age, climate, disturbances and soil fertility.

If all forest stands in this region were just allowed to increase in age by 50 years, their potential to store atmospheric carbon would still increase by 15 percent, the study concludes.

And to show the international significance of recognizing the worth of preserving forests versus cutting them down, the same choice faces the residents of Indonesia.

Selling credits for the billions of tons of carbon that are locked in Indonesia’s tropical rain forests could be as profitable as converting these areas into palm oil plantations, a study released Friday found.

The study, in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Letters, also found that conserving the 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) that are slated to become plantations on Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, would boost the region’s biodiversity. The 800 proposed plantations that were studied contain 40 of the region’s 46 threatened mammals including orangutans and pygmy elephants, the study found.

There’s plenty of misinformation out there about the potential cost of climate change legislation, most of it aimed at scaring people into thinking we can’t afford to do anything. In the current political climate facts are hardly ever allowed to get in the way making a point, but just in the interest of getting the truth out, here are the numbers as presented by the Congressional Budget Office.

Climate change legislation pending in Congress would cost U.S. households only about $175 annually in higher energy and consumer prices, far less than the $3,100 “burden” opponents have claimed would result, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.

“The net annual economy wide cost of the cap and trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion, or about $175 per household,” the CBO, which gives Congress nonpartisan advice about the impact of legislation under consideration, said in an analysis delivered to Congress late on Friday.

And if you don’t think different estimates of the cost are a political issue, think again.

As recently as last month, House Republican leader John Boehner warned against legislation that he sees “saddling” consumers “with an additional $3,100 burden per family each year.”

But the CBO came to a much different conclusion.

Low-income households would see an average net benefit of $40, mostly through rebates and other aid, while high-income families could see added net costs of $245 per year in 2020.

CBO said its analysis focused on the effect of the legislation in the year 2020, at which time cap and trade would have been in effect for eight years and the economy would have had time to adjust to the program.

House Republicans pointed out that the CBO estimated annual gross costs averaging $770 and as high as $1,380 for the wealthiest. A spokesman for Representative Dave Camp acknowledged that those figures do not factor in rebates, tax credits and aid to specific industries included in the legislation.

That’s how you do political math. Add up the numbers that support your cause, and ignore those that add up to a different conclusion. Lucky for us, the CBO is just about the only federal office that the republicans weren’t able to politicize during the eight years of the Bush Administraton. Have no doubt, they will still tout their argument that it would cost the average taxpayer thousands of dollars a year, but once again the Republicans are living in a world based on their own make-believe, one that’s based on numbers that just don’t add up.

I don’t usually do product descriptions or endorsements as a topic here on Thinking Outside, but I’m sure we’ve all noticed the proliferation over the last few years of products on grocery shelves and other places being advertised as green and/or environmentally friendly. it’s a good thing to see manufacturers and retailers showing concern for the environment, but it looks like there’s a whole lot more hype there than there is substance.

More than 98% of supposedly natural and environmentally friendly products on US supermarket shelves are making potentially false or misleading claims, Congress has been told. And 22% of products making green claims bear an environmental badge that has no inherent meaning, said Scot Case, of the environmental consulting firm TerraChoice.

The study of nearly 4,000 consumer products found “greenwashing” in nearly every product category – from a lack of verifiable information to outright lies.

Even the experts are confused. Case, whose firm runs its own Ecologo certification programme, admitted he had bought a refrigerator only to find it failed to meet its claims of energy efficiency.

“My refrigerator used twice as much energy as advertised,” he told members of the House of Representatives committee on commerce, trade and consumer protection. The hearing amounted to a crash course into the perils of the new green marketplace for the committee. Congress is looking at how to guide consumers through a thicket of competing claims on so-called greenness.

One problem is proliferation – both of products claiming to be green and of certification programmes purporting to back up those claims.

So, the advertisers are misleading people, not to big a surprise, that’s what they’re good at. But the practice of setting up “certification programmes” that are actually part of the advertising machinery is doubly mis-leading, and needs to be stopped.

The thing is, many people, when confronted with the problems of waste disposal, pollution, and other consequences of living in a consumer society, really want to try and do a good thing, cutg back on those consequences and buy products that actually serve to accomplish that. Taking advantage of people’s good will by falsely “certifying” that a product is more energy efficient or less polluting than others is a shameful way of taking advantage of people’s good will and desire to do the right thing.

One of the peculiarities of the debate over climate change and what to do about it is that both sides will claim that economics is on their side. It always seemed a bit unlikely that they could both be right, so what’s needed is a source of fact material that would make it easier to judge competing claims.

Look no more, the Real Climate Economics blog is here, and ready to fill the need.

The Real Climate Economics website offers a reader’s guide to the real economics of climate change, an emerging body of scholarship that is consistent with the urgency of the problem as seen from a climate science perspective.

As the climate policy debate intensifies, economic analysis is playing an increasingly central role. The case for inaction is no longer argued on the grounds of skepticism about the science; instead, some have claimed that it will be too expensive to take more than token initiatives. There is now extensive economic analysis that challenges and refutes this idea. The peer-reviewed literature demonstrates that there is rigorous economic support for immediate, large-scale policy responses to the climate crisis.

This is the real deal, the Real Climate Economics site is filled with peer-reviewed research on the economics of doing nothing, doing a little, or doing a lot about climate change. That’s gotta help the cause, it’s a lot easier to sell an idea if you can tell people it will pay off in the end.

We’re pretty familiar with the costs of our current energy sources. Nuclear leaves radioactive waste behind, dams alter the landscape, coal pollutes the air and water and mining for it tears up the landscape and kills people.

it’s tempting, then, when considering alternative energy sources to think of them as solutions without any problems of their own. But that’s not true, a major conversion to solar and wind power, for example, would mean devoting a fair percentage of space to solar panels and wind turbines. There’s also the problem of creating a power transmission infrastructure that would fit small, widely distributed power sources rather than large centralized power plants. For example, a transmission line is being proposed that would bring solar power from the New Mexico desert to cities in Arizona. Sounds like good idea, but there’s a possible environmental catch.

If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. “We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

There is, right now, no known way of meeting the energy needs of hundreds of millions of people living in a highly technological society without affecting the environment in some way. The trick is going to be finding a way to move away from fossil fuels without replacing the problems they bring with a new, but equal set of problems.

The best way to do that is to make sure that what the alternatives are used to replace is coal. if every new wind farm and every new set of solar panels means less coal mined, processed, and burned, then the potential problems that a new infrastructure could bring will be far less than the price we currently pay for burning coal.

Here in the U.S talk of controlling greenhouse gas emissions is revolving around proposals like cap and trade and the possibility of government regulation. Such regulation would probably consist of setting limits, and require investments in technology and power plant upgrades. In Brazil, they’ve come up with another proposal for dealing with power plant emissions.

The Brazilian Environment Ministry announced Monday that power plants using coal and oil for energy generation will have to plant trees to earn their operating licenses from the government.

Responsible for the emission of about 14 million tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, the power utilities will have to offset the environmental cost of electricity generation to get their operating licenses. That includes planting thousands of trees.

That certainly sounds like an interesting idea, and the kind of thinking we could use more of here. Another interesting statement in the quoted article concerns the costs of planting the trees, and a Brazilian official explicitly makes the case that paying for environmental damage should be considered a fundamental cost of doing business.

Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the new requirements are part of the necessary measures for the fulfilment of the goals of Brazil’s National Climate Change Plan.

“It must be remembered that the Environment Ministry is not creating a new cost for the plants. This cost has always existed, but it now must be paid by all society,” he said.

Michigan, like many states, is having a budget crisis. Outdoors and conservation funding always come under pressure in these situations, but Michigan is contemplating a little more extreme than most.

In her 2010 budget, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm proposes to eliminate funding for the state’s 30-year-old Wetlands Program in view of the severe economic challenges facing the state.

The state projects an annual savings of $2 million by repealing its wetlands law, considered a national model. If the law is repealed, some 30 staff positions would be eliminated.

The end result would be to turn management of Michigan’s wetlands over to the federal government. The problem there is that federal wetlands protection is actually less extensive than the state’s. How would such a move affect Michigan’s wetlands? Here’s the pessimistic scenario.

The wetlands most at risk would include isolated wetlands not physically connected to lakes or streams. This category includes 930,856 acres, or 17 percent of Michigan’s wetlands.

Also at risk would be wetlands adjacent to streams that are not relatively permanent - 36 percent of Michigan’s streams are intermittent or ephemeral. No estimate exists of the acreage of wetlands that would be impacted.

Wetlands that are adjacent to isolated lakes and ponds would also be at risk. There are 26,384 isolated lakes and ponds in Michigan - wetlands adjacent to these water bodies would be regulated only if an interstate commerce connection were defined for the lake or pond.

People like to complain about the federal government intruding in their lives, it would be interesting to see what would happen if those feelings were directed toward saving wetlands from federal supervision, instead of the usual list of social issues. It might even make a difference.

Sometimes how an argument is framed nearly guarantees its outcome. President Obama has been talking about “green jobs” and how fighting climate change and greenhouse gas emissions can actually create jobs and benefit the economy. That’s the way he would like to see the argument for promoting conservation and investment in alternative fuels along with protecting the environment and regulating fossil fuels play out.

But there’s an alternate frame out there that seeks to maintain the status quo and protect corporate interests and profits over everything else. That frame seeks to portray the issue as jobs versus the environment, and you can already see it playing out in real life.

One (Motana) bill gets straight to the issue — promising to exempt hundreds of millions in economic stimulus projects from the state’s landmark environmental policies. Environmentalists are ramping up lobbying efforts as a wave of measures eroding regulatory rules gain serious traction in the face of a recession and shrinking state coffers.

“It is about jobs,” said Sen. Jim Keane, a Democrat from the mining town of Butte. “But I think the issue is much bigger than that. All these projects also generate new taxes and revenue for the state government.”

The jobs versus environment frame is a trap in that the argument is forced in to an either/or situation, and in a time of economic crisis it’s pretty easy to predict which choice will prevail.

What gets cut out is the possibility that you can have both economic prosperity and outdoors-friendly policies at the same time.

So as the debate over the budget and the economy and environmental and energy policy goes on one way of keeping track of who’s pushing the public debate will be to keep an ear open for how the debate is framed. If you hear commentators and pundits talking about jobs from investing in alternative fuels and cleaning up pollution and restoring habitat dominating the conversation, you’ll know Obama’s message is getting out. But if it’s all about how we have to get rid of all those pesky regulations in order to create jobs, the business as usual people will be getting their way.