The Fast Train, The Slow Train

It's been a long 3 months, but I'm back. It's been a phase of transition- moving from the dusty Kolwan Valley to the churn of Silicon Valley, with trips to New york and Los Angeles somewhere in between. Now I find myself working for the Environmental Protection Agency in Sacramento, in the heart of California, where summer is quickly becoming very unforgiving.
My mind is slowly starting to refocus. That's a good thing, because there's a lot of exciting stuff going on around the State Capitol. The buzz of activity reminds me of the energy in Nanegaon every time the Gomukh jeep hobbled into town. Althoguh the contexts are so vastly different, the sounds of progress are unmistakably similar.
**********************************************************************
Working in the world of policy is quite a world apart from working in development. Even though my two jobs have striking immediate similarities- working for energy efficiency, and towards a clean energy future, these generalisms obviously don't capture the huge disparity in mindsets between the two worlds. In India, every situation was character and situation-specific, solutions were prescribed on a case by case basis, and problems were solved through direct communication. In Sac, there is the meta-approach that comes with policy-making, where trends and averages trump specifics and details. There is a sense of reconciliation with the democratic process, and victories, although far greater in scope than their counterparts in India, often feel far less satisfying. It is a really fascinating world, where the pace of progress feels slow, but constant and unstoppable, sort of like a trundling steam engine. I know I'd like to be a part of the policy world some day, but on the face of it, I think grassroots work appeals to me more at this stage.
***********************************************************************
Every day, I commute to and from work on the Amtrak- a luxurious passenger train that whizzes through the Sacramento Valley. I try to sit on the upper level, and although recently I've surrendered to sleep on most of my journeys, during my first few weeks I was absolutely entranced by the view out of the train windows. During the short 1.5 hour journey, the train passes through the grunge and urban grittiness of Albany and El Cerrito, the serene waters of the inner San Pablo Bay dotted by sailboats and cargoships, the bridge into the shadowy blue mountains of Benicia, which eventually flatten out into the grassy flatlands of the Sacramento Valley, and the agricultural lands of Davis and Vacaville. Its pretty special to see this much diversity of scenery, and just out the window I saw everything from deer to jackrabbits to horses and sheep.
But the same route is also marked with a very different kind of scenery, the kind that never fails to remind me of the big players in the US landscape- the refineries, generation facilities and research units of big oil, big electricity and big agribusiness. Most people know of agribusiness giant Monsanto's headquarters near Sacramento, and as you roll into Benicia and Martinez, you enter a jungle of electricity generation facilities and oil refineries. As most of my work at the EPA surrounds climate change and the clean energy programs pushed by both Governor Schwarzenegger and President Obama, these sights serve as an alarm that the bubble of Sacramento is just that- a bubble- and the real Green Revolution might take a very, very long time.
It is understandable that for conventional oil and electricity companies, it may be difficult to embrace clean energy and tolerate the costs that come with the new enthusiasm in Sacramento (and Washington) for curbing emissions and cleaning up our act. They are the bulwark that the American empire has been built on for the last fifty or sixty years, so the new changes aren't about re-decorating the house- they're about tearing apart and restructuring the foundation.
What is less clear to most, however, is the role of big agribusiness and the agriculture sector in the campaign for clean energy. The Waxman Markey draft bill- an all-encompassing bill to curb carbon emissions and pave the way towards a clean energy future, is due to go up in the House Agricultural Commmittee, and most expect it to see a pretty tough fight there. But why? The agricultural sector isn't even one of the capped sectors in the cap and trade program to curb carbon emissions. Most of the regulation falls on big industry, transportation and electricity.
All sensible points- but government is where sense starts to melt away, and give way to politics. Most of the Agricultural contention comes from the issue of offsets, which are essentially credits delivered to capped entities in order to meet compliance obligation in return for investment in carbon emission reducing projects elsewhere. Under the proposed bill, these offsets could be used initially for about 30% of a capped entities compliance obligation, and eventually even upto 60%. Considering a carbon allowance market in the trillions- this means a lot of potential money for the offset program- and thus a lot of incentive for various interest groups to tailor the definition of offsets to suit themselves. Here's where the Agricultural Sector comes in. Dominated by a handful of big agribusiness companies, the lobby would like to see most offsets come from projects that are both domestic, and would help agribusiness. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this- unless of course these criteria do not result in real carbon reductions. Or, as some environmentalists claim- they may result in minor carbon sequestrations, but lead to greater Nitrogen emissions, which may be equally bad for the environment.
Unfortunately, most of the time these criticisms fall on deaf ears, as the eventual fate of the bill will most likely hinge on a suitable political compromise, rather than an objective scientific evaluation. Either way, its a good illustration of how something as cruicial as offsets can be blown this way and that by the breezes of Capitol lobbyists.
But I don't mean to sound too critical or cynical. We live in a democracy and it comes with the territory. And that's just the way it goes.
Good luck Waxman and Markey!
-Nikhil