K'Ching!

Last week I received a response to my public records request. You may recall that I had asked the Department of Energy Resources how much of the RGGI auction proceeds ($5. million of public money) the utility companies will get. Here is the breakdown:

Cape Light Compact $357,000.00
Fitchburg/Unitil $107,725.00
NSTAR $1,452,530.00
National Grid $4,000,000.00
Western Mass/NE Utilities pending
Total $5,917,255.00

The biggest winner was National Grid, raking in a cheery $4 million. Where did that money come from? By way of a quick reminder, it came from the December 2008 CO2 auction. In exchange for the right to spew tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, companies that generate electricity give the states money, and the states give the money to companies that distribute electricity.

In the December 2008 auction there were 69 bidders and most of them, approximately 85%, were so-called "compliance entities," companies such as National Grid. Yes, National Grid.

So what does National Grid also have in its hands as a result of the auction? Pollution permits and a cool $4 million.

NSTAR didn't do too badly either. Its share of the public money was over $1.4 million. I can't help wondering why NSTAR needs that public money. After all, what were NSTAR's revenues last year? According to its website, $3.3 billion. In 2008 its net income went up 7.2% and things look rosy for 2009. The annual report boasts:

"We have also increased the dividend we pay to shareholders for the 11th consecutive year -- further indication of our financial strength. NSTAR increased the common dividend rate to $1.50 per share for 2009, up from $1.40 in 2008, a 7.1% increase."

Feeling queasy yet?

THURSDAY, APRIL 16

Save the date! On Thursday, April 16, three Massachusetts Greens who were at the Capitol Climate Action will be in Northampton. The venue is the Unitarian Society, 220 Main Street, and the event kicks off at 7:00 p.m.

Jill Stein, Eli Beckerman, and Dave Dionne are coming to Western Massachusetts for a conversation with local activists; to report back on the D.C. action, to listen, and to help plan next steps toward a secure green future.

To download the flier (right) just right click on the image, scroll down to "save image as..." and save it in a file of your choosing.

Reggie, but not Reggie Perrin

(Reggie Perrin was the salaryman turned entrepreneur turned commune-founder in the satirical BBC show The Fall and Rise of Reginal Perrin)

Let's think about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, which the cool kids pronounce Reggie, I gather) the first-in-the-nation CO2 cap-and-trade program that Massachusetts co-founded. By the way, like many people who grew up in Britain in the 1970s, I can't hear the name Reggie without thinking of Reggie Perrin. Hence the picture.

But first a word about Gaia.

In Greek mythology, Gaia was a deity, a goddess representing the Earth. The Gaia theory claims that Earth is a single, complex superorganism that regulates its environment the way an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance.

Gaia the theory (the theory about the very real natural world) owes its name to Gaia the goddess, an imaginary inhabitant of an imaginary supernatural world.

I was reading The Guardian earlier this week and I noticed that James Lovelock, the environmental scientist who came up with the Gaia theory, has compared market systems that resemble cap-and-trade programs to slavery. Lovelock was at a debate on biodiversity sponsored by the journal Nature, and he was responding to the idea of putting a price on the “ecosystem services” that oceans and rivers provide. That seems to be a growing line of business, by the way.

This is what Lovelock said, according to The Guardian: “To talk of these ecosystems as something we can own and draw benefits from, and buy and sell, is just like the attitude not so long ago to slavery, and just as reprehensible.”

Lovelock also mentioned the ease with which cap-and-trade systems degenerate into “scams” (his word) that benefit industry but don’t benefit life on Earth.

Massachusetts participates in Reggie and for a while now I’ve been curious about its effectiveness. I grew more curious and, to be honest, a tad suspicious, when I read Governor Deval Patrick’s press release about how Massachusetts was going to spend its Reggie winnings.

What do I mean by “winnings”?

You already know how Reggie works, I suppose, but here is a brief refresher. Under Reggie, the participating states sell a finite number of pollution permits. A company needs a permit for every ton of carbon dioxide it emits. Over time, the states reduce the number of pollution permits. The number of permits drops and, hey presto, the amount of CO2 drops as well.

Energy companies pay for the permits at auctions, and each participating state gets a share of the auction proceeds, which I crassly refer to as “winnings.” What happens to the winnings after the state governments get their hands on the cash? That’s what I was (and still am) curious about.

After the December 2008 Reggie auction, Governor Patrick announced that the Department of Public Utilities would be dedicating $5.9 million “for the state’s electric and natural gas utilities to aggressively expand their energy efficiency programs this year to help consumers reduce their winter heating bills.”

What struck me was the possibility that what the utilities giveth in the auction, the utilities taketh away soon after.

So on January 19, 2009, I wrote the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) with the following simple request:

On reading the Governor’s press release regarding the December RGGI auction, I notice that the Department will be dedicating $5.9 million “for the state’s electric and natural gas utilities to aggressively expand their energy efficiency programs this year to help consumers reduce their winter heating bills.” Please let me know whether this means that the utility companies will receive the $5.9 million.

A few weeks went by, with no reply from DPU. So on February 8, I asked again, this time by way of a public records request under Mass General Laws Chapter 66 Section 10, and I received a prompt response from the Legal Division.

You can read the letter if you like, but this is the gist: look online.

I did. I went to the site as directed, looked through the wealth of documents, and could not find out how much the private utilities are raking in from the public's auction winnings. Given my regular inability to locate the ketchup in the refrigerator, this may be another case of me not looking long enough or in the right place.

Alternatively, it really is hard to find, or simply not there.

By the way, I called the attorney who signed the Department of Public Utilities letter and she told me that she’d gotten the information from another attorney, but it’s probably not the Department of Public Utilities that has those records anyway. The Department of Energy Resources (DOER) is the department that actually spends the Reggie winnings.

I have sent my public records request to DOER and I’ll let you know what they say.

In the meantime, it’s worth double-checking the Public Utilities site, and I would appreciate it if you would help me to follow the money.

Here’s my request. Go online to the Commonwealth’s website, www.mass.gov, click on Utility Regulatory Energy Efficiency, then choose “electric energy efficiency dockets,” and check out the 2008 energy-efficiency plans.

If you can find details of the Reggie funds, please let me know. And if you cannot, please let me know.

By the way, Reggie is not an ecosystem-services program, the kind of thing that James Lovelock was having a go at. It’s a cap-and-trade program. But there are similarities. Most importantly both are rooted in faith, faith in markets and the ability of markets to solve problems.

I can see the appeal. After all, it was humans acting through markets that created the problem, so why shouldn’t humans acting through markets be able to solve it?

Well, sometimes markets work and sometimes they don’t, not that you need reminding of that during the current recession.

How can we tell whether a market-based program – like Reggie – is working toward the common good or (as the market skeptics among us might suspect) working to the disproportionate advantage of the private industries it’s supposed to be helping control?

Evidence.

I’m a lawyer and, when it comes to proving things, lawyers prefer evidence to faith.

Taxing Gas

Leo Maley, executive director of Progressive Massachusetts PAC, explains why Greens and Progressives should support the 19-cent increase in the gas tax.

Mount Tom Demo

Holyoke, MA, Sunday, March 1: I am happy to say that more than 60 activists gathered at Mount Tom power station today. An earlier version of this post said 30, but Tina Clarke did a head-count and I trust her arithmetic more than I trust my own.

Kudos to David Starr of GREEN Northampton for helping turn us all out. At the same time demonstrations were happening at coal-burning stations in the eastern part of the state, sponsored (like ours) by the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities.

Our mission was to call on the station owners in particular, GDF Suez, and policymakers in general to stop burning coal. Tina Clarke (on the left of the picture) and Rev. Margaret Bullitt Jonas (right) addressed the crowd. A lone officer from the Holyoke Police Department watched us from his cruiser, parked at the entrance to the station. When I went up to introduce myself I noticed he was idling; I let it go, which was wimpy of me, I admit.

But at least the officer was there doing his duty, and that is more than I can say for the mainstream media. ABC News 40 had said they would show up to cover the event but didn't. Nor did any reporters from the two local newspapers, the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Repubican, make an appearance. Fortunately Francesca Rheannon from WMUA and a team from Valley Free Radio's Enviro Show were there to do what newspaper reporters used to do back in the day, i.e. find out what's going on and why.

Tina recalled the long struggle to force the station's former owners to reduce SOx and NOx emissions, and noted the current owner's tendency to take credit for simply complying with the law. Margaret, whose ministry centers on the struggle against global warming, described the abuse of the climate as a sin. Then, reminding us that all great movements sing, she led us in song.

Both Margaret and Tina talked about the impact of global warming on people we don't usually think of as our neighbors but who are on the front lines, paying an immediate and unjustifiable price for our consumption of fossil fuels.

For my part, I mentioned the significance of the number 350 and the fact that in the Christian calendar today, March 1, is Saint David's Day.*

Veteran peace and justice activist Frances Crowe announced a one-item wish list for her upcoming 90th birthday: everybody stay home and don't burn gas. On the subject of boosting public transportation, Leo Maley urged us to support the proposal to increase the state gas tax by 19 cents a gallon. Joan Grenier mentioned that Bill McKibben will be in South Hadley soon (details to follow) and Tom Neilson sang us a wonderful song that he wrote for the occasion.

We left Mount Tom at about 2:00 p.m., with snowflakes in the air and joy in our hearts. Several people driving by had honked in solidarity, and we had borne witness to one another (and the officer from Holyoke PD).

But what's next? If that was it -- if today's demo was the beginning and end of our struggle to put an end to coal-burning at Mount Tom -- we won't have achieved anything more than an hour in the outdoors, a sing-along, and a chat with old friends.

So what do you think? What will you commit to doing to stop the burning of coal? While you ponder that, please bear in mind that April 1 is coming up. It's exactly one month away and nowadays, at least as far as some of us are concerned, April 1 is Fossil Fools Day.

*Welsh people will know this already but, for blog readers who were careless enough to have been born outside Wales, I should mention that Saint David's claim to fame was a little out of the ordinary for religious leaders. He didn't slay dragons like St. George or expel snakes like St. Patrick. He just grew leeks. Wales may be the only country whose patron saint was an organic farmer.