North Carolina's hogs join the fight against global warming.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Sunday, September 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
North Carolina's global-warming activists are in hog heaven. Late last month, Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat in his second term, signed legislation mandating that more electric power in his state come from "green" sources such as wind, solar energy, and hog and chicken waste.
Today, North Carolina gets about 2% of its electricity from "renewable resources." By 2021, under the new mandates, Progress Energy and Duke Energy will have to find 12.5% of the power that they sell to Tar Heel residents from renewables. Hog-waste-generated power--as required by the new law--will nearly triple to 0.2% of the electricity used in the state over the next decade as farmers capture and sell the methane gas given off from tons of decomposing manure.
It's gone largely uncovered outside the state, but there is an energy revolution underway in the Tar Heel State that will cost residents more for the energy they use in the name of cutting greenhouse gases. Even while they make little headway in Congress, advocates of heavy-handed regulations to head off global warming are working to enact laws on the state level. They're succeeding in North Carolina.
The immediate cost to consumers will be higher electric bills. For residential customers, an annual fee will eventually reach $34, and for industry the annual fee will grow to as much as $1,000.
The new hog mandate is only the beginning. The state has set up a special commission--the Climate Action Plan Advisory Group--to study ways to cut CO2 emissions. It's already adopted a list of 53 recommended new mandates and is drafting a report for the state legislature.
A few ideas the commission will recommend in its report next month include mandates for "higher-density" housing developments, something thought to reduce suburban "sprawl," and, of course, new subsidies for farmers to produce biodiesel.
It will also recommend imposing new costs on the driving public. One thought is to force drivers who put more miles on their odometer to pay higher car-insurance premiums than those who drive less. And it will recommend a CO2 tax or a cap-and-trade system, assuming such a system could be worked out on a state level.
These ideas don't come out of thin air. They are in part the product of a five-year effort by the Center for Climate Strategies--a global warming group funded by several well-known foundations--that first got active in North Carolina under the auspices of a law enacted in 2002 aimed at reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Under that law, the state's Division of Air Quality was required to study ways to reduce CO2 emissions. That mandate led to the creation of the special commission that will soon hand over its list of recommended new mandates to the legislature. To conduct its studies, the Division of Air Quality turned to the Center for Climate Strategies.
Five years ago, no one batted an eye at working with CCS because the organization doesn't engage in advocacy, but rather limits itself to an advisory role. CCS and its affiliated groups do not have an "advocacy mission" nor do they have "an advocacy history," Executive Director Tom Peterson told the Carolina Journal earlier this year. Brian Hill, president of CCS's parent nonprofit, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, has made similar statements: "CCS provides a model facilitation service and does not advance an agenda in terms of final policy decisions in respective states."
Nevertheless, CCS has worked closely with the state's commission to develop anti-CO2 ideas even as it is funded by foundations that are known to push anti-climate-change policies in other states and at the federal level. Over the past five years, CCS has spent some $350,000 in North Carolina, money it received from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Surdna Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and others, according to the John Locke Foundation's Paul Chesser, who has plotted CCS's activities in the state. Among the top issues for these charities is to stop global warming.
Ted Turner's foundation, as well as the Heinz Endowments and the Energy Foundation, have given money to CCS to work on developing policy ideas aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Mr. Peterson himself did his best Al Gore impersonation last month, telling the National Governors Association that "action taken, or not taken" on greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years will be "critical to get on a pathway to stability."
All of this has stayed off of the front pages because CCS limits its role to advising state agencies as they draw up scientific studies and reports on the environment. And not just in North Carolina. CCS is active in 16 states, including California, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington. The group has also been active in New England and the West, where states have formed regional compacts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Typically, CCS has worked under an executive order issued by a governor looking for political cover from environmental organizations (though in the Tar Heel State, it operated under a state law). But advisory or advocacy, the end result is the same: CCS is playing a significant role in developing anti-CO2 regulations that are being enacted at the state level. At this pace, within a few more years the U.S. Congress could become irrelevant in the debate over cutting carbon emissions.
In North Carolina, even some environmentalists were uneasy about the new hog mandates. At least one organization wants the law revised because of concerns over water pollution. It seems that using hogs to generate electricity can reduce the amount of carbon released into the air, but it could also create other problems. Hogs may be a naturally occurring source of power, but that doesn't mean they are clean.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.
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