Gov. Jerry Brown (D) received plenty of early support for his proposal, in his Jan. 5 inaugural speech, to get half of California’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

A lawyer who represents renewable energy developers said the media coverage of Brown’s goal has sparked interest from the public as well as renewables advocates. "I’ve gotten several calls from landowners saying, ‘I have land I’d like to lease to a wind developer, can you give me a call?’" said Jerry Bloom, chairman of the law firm Winston & Strawn’s energy practice.

Observers say the goal — as well as Brown’s other inaugural pledges to halve petroleum use and double the efficiency of existing buildings — points to sweeping changes in how California plans for and procures its energy.

Achieving 50 percent renewables by 2030 would be the most ambitious target in the country, by far. State energy experts hypothesize it may take more than merely expanding California’s existing renewables portfolio standard of 33 percent by 2020.

Brown "did not use the words ‘renewables portfolio standard,’" said Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association, referring to the increasingly common policy, now in place in 29 states. It requires a certain percentage of electricity to come from renewable energy by a given year. "It’s ’50 percent renewable resources,’ so what does that mean?"

An advocate for rooftop solar installations agreed that the 50 percent goal opens the door for new policies.

"That’s the million-dollar question right now: What does this new policy framework look like, how much do we draw from the past, how much do we re-create for the future?" said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar Energy Industries Association.

Businesses in California have been thinking about this goal for some time. An analysis is well underway on how the state can cut its carbon footprint in half by 2030. It’s being funded by about two dozen companies, trade groups and foundations with interests in large-scale renewable energy, including GE, Sunpower, NRG, BrightSource Energy, the American Wind Energy Association and the Energy Foundation.

Phase 1 of the study, conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, created two scenarios where the grid could use renewables, natural gas, energy efficiency, storage, and combined heat-and-power plants to reduce electric-sector emissions to 47 million metric tons of CO2 total — 50 percent below 2012 emissions levels.

Phase 2, due out early this year, will include analyses of potential effects on reliability and utility rates.

V. John White, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, which is spearheading the study, said Brown’s proposals — which also include a pledge to halve petroleum use and double the efficiency of existing buildings — could dovetail with existing efforts to set an overall 2030 emissions target for the state. A bill introduced in the state Senate last year by Sen. Fran Pavley (D), S.B. 32, would require the state’s Air Resources Board to approve a 2050 emissions target of 80 percent below 1990 levels and provides for interim targets in 2030 and 2040, as well (E&ENews PM, Jan. 5).

The eventual policy could be much broader than the current strategy of renewables procurement, which relies on the California Public Utilities Commission to approve contracts between developers and utilities based on lowest cost.

"While the 50 percent goal can be readily achieved, it needs to be achieved in the context of a greenhouse gas reduction target, and the means of achieving those renewables to get to the low-carbon number will require a different way of procuring than the compliance-based RPS," White said.

Policies will need to focus on not just increasing the amount of wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and other renewable sources, but also boosting energy storage and demand response so the grid can handle the influx of renewables.

"It has every opportunity to reignite the market and create demand for more renewables, but in my view, to be successful, it has to be organized around the goal of achieving the greenhouse gas reductions and using renewables, storage, demand response as the backbone of the grid and not just as an ancillary add-on," White said.

California’s grid is already experiencing the effects of surplus renewables.

Any discussion of integrating renewable electricity in California begins with an explanation of the "duck curve." For years now, state energy experts have been warning about the phenomenon, named after the shape that electricity supply and demand is taking as renewables ramp up during the middle part of the day.

That creates two problems: one, when renewables create a surplus that competes with traditional power plants, whose economics demand that they run continuously; and two, when the intermittent nature of renewables causes the quality of electricity to decline.

Four times this past spring, the state’s grid operator had to shut off wind and solar power when it exceeded demand. The largest such curtailment was 1,100 megawatts during the morning of April 27, 2014.

"Grid operators are now seeing overgeneration beginning to manifest itself during the midday hours necessitating curtailments, just as the duck curve forecasted," said CAISO spokesman Steven Greenlee.

The plants that were curtailed likely received all of their contracted payments from the utilities, as contracts generally have a small curtailment provision built in. But as curtailment becomes more likely, contracts could become more flexible in the future, Bloom said.

"I think it means the contracts will allow for increased flexibility for dispatch by the utilities over time," he said. "There’s a big change from the old days, when if you produced, they had to take it."

There will be a need to incorporate energy storage into renewables projects, as well. Right now, a solar project without storage would beat out one with storage solely on cost, even though utilities are under a new mandate as of last year to procure 1.3 gigawatts of storage by 2020.

"There’s no value associated with solving the duck belly problem or being better integrated into the grid," Smutny-Jones said. That, too, can be dealt with through the procurement process, he said.

Another solution frequently mentioned is to use the excess midday renewable power for other things, such as charging electric vehicles or even desalinating seawater.

"This is an area we’ve been looking at internally as potentially a big opportunity," Smutny-Jones said. "The question is, can that power be utilized in a way that has some additional benefit, either economically or through the climate change issue?"

When asked whether he anticipated fossil fuel generators to oppose Brown’s goal, Smutny-Jones said he didn’t.

"No, I don’t think so," he said. "I represent most of them."

The state already has very little coal-fired generation, due to the 2006 law S.B. 1368, which prohibits new contracts with power sources that generate more than 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour. Coal-fired power totaled just 0.51 percent of in-state generation in 2013, according to the California Energy Commission. Natural gas made up 60.5 percent of in-state generation.

"The simple fact of the matter is, California needs a clean gas fleet to keep the lights on," he said. "While the rest of the country is shifting from coal to gas, we’ve got a relatively clean gas plant that will continue to provide backup services when other renewable technologies aren’t there to meet the overall load."

A manufacturing industry representative said he worried about the potential cost to electricity customers, particularly large-scale users.

"This is a difficult place to compete as a manufacturer, and it’s getting harder," said Gino DiCaro, spokesman for the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, which includes such members as Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Chevron, Kraft Foods and Kimberly-Clark.

He said California’s industrial electricity rates are about 80 percent higher than the national average, and that part of the disparity is due to the existing 33 percent RPS. "We can’t just make bold, ambitious goals without understanding exactly what they’re going to cost our economy," he said.

Still, DiCaro praised Brown’s approach thus far in terms of coordination between the roughly half-dozen state agencies that are involved in setting energy policy.

"The governor’s office seems to be better coordinated wth all the different agencies than ever, and that’s a good thing," he said. "We can’t be lumping policy on top of policy to reach this goal."

The Senate’s consideration of legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline proceeded relatively smoothly yesterday, but some lawmakers are beginning to wonder whether they’ll have to turn up for an all-night session soon to eventually complete work on the bill, which is a top priority for the new Republican majority.

Today will bring a series of votes "throughout the day," Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the floor yesterday, starting with six pending amendments that have been offered by both parties. However, there is no formal unanimous consent agreement to set up quick votes on those amendments, including two from Democrats declaring climate change is real and caused by human activity, so there is some question about how debate will proceed.

"It depends. I think we’d all like to have a vote-a-rama," said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a lead co-sponsor of the KXL bill, using a Capitol Hill colloquialism for a lengthy vote series. "Let’s just stay here all night and do it."

A Republican senator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that GOP leaders would not allow debate over the bill to linger indefinitely but said it remained to be seen how they would cut that off without abandoning the commitment to let Democrats get votes on their amendments. An all-night session could be one way to do that because it likely would persuade senators to agree to shortened debate timelines, drop largely symbolic amendments or agree to single votes on a group of similar items.

"I have always thought we would end up doing some late nights because, as you know, back in the old days, when we actually legislated around here, that’s the way you got things done," the GOP senator said.

Yesterday brought the first series of amendment votes to the KXL bill, S. 1, in a relatively smooth process that saw the overwhelming adoption of a modest, bipartisan energy efficiency amendment to the bill and near party-line votes to kill two Democratic amendments (E&ENews PM, Jan. 20).

Senators technically cast procedural votes to table the two Democratic amendments — Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey’s to block exports of KXL oil or refined products it goes into and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken’s to require that U.S. steel be used to build the pipeline. GOP aides said votes on such motions were commonplace to more quickly dispense with items.

Some Democrats said they were fine with that approach but acknowledged discussions were ongoing within the caucus as to whether they would agree to alternative arrangements — such as a 60-vote threshold to attach amendments to the underlying legislation itself.

"I don’t think there’s any confusion as this gets discussed, this is a vote on … barring exports and making them build the pipeline with American steel. I think voters see through a lot of this," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is pursuing an amendment that would require Canadian oil sands producers to pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.

Some Republicans have previously agreed that the "loophole" sparing oil sands from the 8-cents-per-barrel tax to pay into the trust fund should be closed, but they have said that policy change should take place in the context of broader tax reform and not be tacked on to other measures (E&E Daily, Feb. 27, 2013).

Last week, Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an amendment that would have treated oil sands the same as other types of crude, with the caveat that the policy change be enacted only after a determination that it would not cause gasoline prices to increase.

Wyden said discussions were ongoing about how to proceed with the two amendments.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who has been a key player throughout the negotiations around the KXL bill, agreed that votes to table Democratic amendments were not a violation of McConnell’s pledge to return to regular order. Such votes, she said, were just as effective in letting Democrats get their message across.

"They don’t even want to discuss all of these important issues," she said. "So I think that record shows."

As for the endgame, Wyden and Boxer said it was unclear but that they would continue to push for votes beyond those currently in the queue. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), whose climate science amendment is pending today, earlier in the afternoon accused Republicans of "trying to weasel out of voting on" some controversial amendments.

Meanwhile, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the GOP whip, accused Democrats of trying to obstruct the process and suggested Republicans may eventually try to find a way around them.

"Right now, they’re sort of in this mindset that they don’t want us to be successful, and so we’re going to have to break through some of this by using procedural tools," Cornyn said yesterday evening, not long before McConnell said senators should expect a day of votes today. "Hopefully that won’t be necessary."

The United States must act on climate change, but it doesn’t have to do it alone, President Obama said last night.

The president used his second-to-last State of the Union address not only to mount a passionate defense of his administration’s climate policies but to frame them as part of a global struggle to contain a challenge that he said threatens future generations.

The president couched his declaration that "no challenge … poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change" in the international policy section of his address. And while he glossed over specific domestic policies — like U.S. EPA’s power plant carbon rules and proposals to curb oil and gas methane — he reminded his audience that China agreed last year for the first time to cap its own emissions as part of a deal with the United States.

"And because the world’s two largest economies came together, other nations are now stepping up and offering hope that, this year, the world will finally reach an agreement to protect the one planet we’ve got," he said.

Supporters said Obama was showing his commitment to help secure a strong U.N. emissions agreement this December in Paris — the first such deal that could require reductions from both developed and major developing nations.

Obama helped pave the way for a deal by pledging that the United States would cut its own emissions between 26 and 28 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2025. The promise was made as part of a U.S.-China deal, and environmentalists hope Obama’s visit to India next week will also include climate-related announcements.

"By framing climate change more as a global issue than he ever has before, the president is both acknowledging the need to address the growing emissions share from developing countries and signaling his intention to continue aggressive international climate approaches, including bilateral efforts with India and others," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate aide, now a senior fellow on energy at the German Marshall Fund.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said after the speech that Obama appeared to be looking to Paris as his next big opportunity on climate.

"I think given the extensive executive authority in the area of foreign affairs, and the extent to which the fossil fuels industry currently controls the Republican Party in Congress, that’s a prudent place for him to direct his attention," he said. "But as a member of Congress, I still think there’s hope for Congress."

Whitehouse, who heads several climate caucuses, has said that Congress might be persuaded to enact a price on carbon emissions relatively soon as a substitute for EPA regulations.

The president has included climate change in every State of the Union address except his speech in 2011 — the year after hopes died that Congress might enact a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade bill.

Last night’s rhetoric was bolder than any past year — a fact that some critics attributed to Obama’s never having to see his party through a national election again.

But in declaring that no threat is greater than climate change, Obama appeared to be borrowing a line from his secretary of State, John Kerry, who made waves last year by classifying warming with threats like terrorism, epidemics and weapons of mass destruction.

"The reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them," Kerry said last February (Greenwire, Feb. 17, 2014).

The president noted last night the Pentagon’s warnings that climate change endangers national security by contributing to conflicts over resources.

"Global challenges require global solutions, and President Obama made clear that the U.S. will lead in a way that builds partnership and action from all countries," said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute.

"Tonight’s words not only signal that climate change is a legacy issue for the president, but it is also a clear and present danger to America’s national security," said Todd Shelton, top lobbyist for the World Wildlife Fund, in a statement. "Now, he must continue his push to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas pollution and work with Congress to fully fund our promised fair share of the Green Climate Fund."

The president’s speech last night did not mention his promise that the United States would contribute $3 billion over four years to the U.N. fund for climate adaptation and mitigation in poor countries. The administration has said it will begin asking Congress for the dollars as part of its fiscal 2016 budget request.

Frank Maisano of Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents industry clients, said the fund was omitted because it would make a poor message.

"People generally don’t like the U.N., its climate process and giving away money to other countries," he said.

While the international piece of the president’s Climate Action Plan was a focus last night, it was not the only one.

The issue’s prominence was clear even from some of the guests who were present. Nicole Hernandez Hammer, a sea-level expert in southeast Florida, was one of first lady Michelle Obama’s guests. By contrast, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) hosted Robert Murray, the outspoken CEO of Murray Energy Corp. who has decried Obama’s climate agenda as a "war on coal."

The president promised the majority-Republican chambers of Congress that he would fight any legislation they put before him that would prevent the administration from limiting emissions at home.

This won applause from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the Environment and Public Works Committee’s ranking member, who has made defending EPA regulations a top goal for several years.

"He’s going to veto any bill that repeals Obamacare or climate change or Wall Street reform," she said. "So he is reaching out a hand, but he is also letting them know where he draws the line in the sand."

But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Obama’s overt threat to veto legislation he doesn’t like is at odds with the plea he made in his speech for bipartisan cooperation.

"The content of his speech was, I would say, completely divisive," Johnson said. "There are very few things that we can find common ground on, and he knows that."

The entire climate section of the speech was an appeal to Obama’s base, Johnson said. Republicans will try to roll back administration rules that they believe are overreaching, he predicted, "and the best place to do that is the appropriations process."

Last night’s speech comes at the start of what promises to be a pivotal year for Obama’s climate agenda, even before his State Department representatives arrive in Paris. EPA is poised to finalize its rules for power plant carbon dioxide emissions by midsummer, with a proposal for new oil and gas methane constraints due at about the same time. The agency’s proposal for heavy-duty vehicle tailpipe emissions is due this spring and will target the transportation sector’s second-largest contributor to climate change.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said last week at a roundtable with reporters that she expects to spend a hefty amount of time on Capitol Hill explaining her agency’s actions.

"We’ll make our case, and we’ll make our case, and we’ll make our case," she said.

But McCarthy said that while Republican majorities have many tools at their disposal to limit her agency’s regulatory authorities, she is confident that Obama will use his power to keep that from happening.

"The president has made it very clear the support he is providing to this agency and his interest in maintaining our ability to protect public health and the environment," she told reporters at the roundtable. "The president clearly has our back."

Obama did not directly refer to his administration’s new methane strategy for oil and natural gas last night, though he did briefly mention that the United States has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer on his watch.

GOP strategist Mike McKenna predicted before the speech — correctly — that Obama would abandon his "all of the above" rhetoric on energy production and climate change now that he no longer has any elections to win.

"I think this is the State of the Union where he just shaves the beard and comes out of the cave and is just opposed to all energy production from traditional fuels," McKenna said.

"The methane [strategy] wasn’t much, but it was the first step this administration has taken directed right at natural gas production," he said. "So I think the era of good feelings between him and the natural gas industry is over."

But Marty Durbin, president of America’s Natural Gas Alliance, said that Obama should tout the natural gas development that has occurred on his watch.

"He has acknowledged the positive and beneficial role we’re playing in the economy," he said in an interview before the speech. But Durbin said last week’s announcement of new mandatory methane curbs for future infrastructure hints that EPA "had to drag the industry to the table to do something" on methane, when in fact it already was making reductions.

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in a statement that Obama should not take credit for gains made by an energy sector he is working to destroy.

"Our nation’s energy industry deserves the credit for the growth we see today," he said. "We are experiencing an energy revolution in spite of the president’s policies that are intended to stifle the development of our domestic resources."

Inhofe also called some of EPA’s climate proposals "a wealth redistribution scheme."

Reporter Manuel Quiñones contributed.

Only last spring, Joe Szabo was playing a familiar role in his job as head of the Federal Railroad Administration: fending off criticism of California’s high-speed rail project from congressional detractors questioning whether it would ever be built.

Earlier this month, as he prepared to leave the post he’d held for almost six years, Szabo was in a less accustomed spot: celebrating the huge — and hugely controversial — endeavor at a ceremonial groundbreaking in Fresno (Greenwire, Jan. 7).

Although the timing was coincidental, "I just can’t think of a better way to end my tenure," he said afterward.

It was a final high note in what Szabo calls a "wonderful and wild" ride unlike that of any of his predecessors at the small Transportation Department agency — one marked by partisan strife over unprecedented passenger rail spending, the struggle to implement two landmark laws, and safety worries unleashed by the boom in railroad oil shipments. At congressional hearings, Szabo bore the brunt of Republican attacks on the Obama administration’s embrace of high-speed rail. Even allies question whether he was able to change the mindset of an agency historically aligned with the freight rail industry.

Regrets? Szabo, 57, professed none in a follow-up interview just before he officially stepped down this month to take a job in his hometown of Chicago.

"You can’t have regrets," he said. "You have to have confidence in the job that you’ve set out to do."

Among his proudest accomplishments, he said, are a sharp drop in on-the-job deaths among railroad workers and fostering "game-changing" improvements in states’ ability to plan and carry out rail projects. FRA’s policy office was restructured, he said, with fresh talent. If the Obama administration’s vision for high-speed bullet trains remains a tough sell with Republican lawmakers, Szabo predicted it’s only a matter of time before Congress catches up with grass-roots pressure to get on board.

"I leave with a high level of satisfaction," Szabo said. Prompting his departure, he said, is the need to tend to his ailing 87-year-old father. Last week, he started a job as senior fellow at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. Temporarily taking his place at the railroad administration is Sarah Feinberg, a former White House aide who joined the Department of Transportation as chief of staff 16 months ago. There is no timetable for naming a new permanent administrator, according to DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx.

President Obama nominated Szabo, who had the backing of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), to run the railroad administration in March 2009. Unanimous Senate confirmation followed little more than a month later. In naming Szabo, a onetime railyard switchman and train conductor who became a state lobbyist with what was then the United Transportation Union, the White House broke with a tradition of plucking FRA leaders from the ranks of railroad management, said Larry Mann, a rail safety attorney. Mann, who considers Szabo a friend, called him "an excellent administrator."

Despite his labor background, Szabo "did not cater to the unions," Mann said. "His approach was balanced. He called it the way he felt was appropriate."

But because career federal employees cannot be easily removed from their jobs, Mann said, Szabo had less success in overhauling the culture of a regulatory agency long seen by critics as tilted toward the industry it is supposed to oversee.

In 2005, for example, DOT’s inspector general reproved one top official for taking vacations with a lobbyist for Union Pacific Corp. Although the review found no evidence of favoritism, the inspector general noted that Union Pacific was inspected proportionately less even though it had the highest average number of train accidents of the four major freight railroads. In addition, all four carriers "had substantial safety and inspection issues," the report said.

Szabo arrived at FRA just after Congress had handed the agency sweeping new mandates with the 2008 passage of two major laws: the Rail Safety Improvement Act and the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act. The first, enacted barely a month after a collision between freight and commuter trains killed 25 people near Los Angeles, was the most comprehensive piece of rail safety legislation in almost 40 years. Most notably, it set a December 2015 deadline for railroads to implement positive train control, an umbrella term for an array of costly anti-crash communication technologies.

The passenger rail investment law was Amtrak’s first reauthorization in more than a decade. Among other provisions, it ordered FRA to help the passenger railroad set standards to improve chronically poor train punctuality. In addition, the railroad administration, which had hitherto run only small grant programs, was charged with doling out some $8 billion for high-speed and intercity passenger rail projects appropriated in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"Obviously, the plate is full, but I truly cannot think of a better time, a more exciting time to be leading FRA," Szabo said at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Szabo quickly established himself as a strong advocate of expanding passenger rail service to meet future transportation needs.

But FRA’s handling of the high-speed rail program came under fire from critics who said the agency was spreading the money around too many projects to produce much payoff.

In the 2010 elections, Republicans targeted the grants as a prime example of stimulus-related waste. Within months of winning office, newly elected GOP governors in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin canceled planned high-speed rail ventures, cumulatively rejecting more than $3 billion in previously approved federal funding.

"I laughed at them," Szabo said, adding that Wisconsin is now proceeding with improvements to the Chicago-Milwaukee line "on their own dime."

A large chunk of the returned money was rerouted to California, where boosters credit the shift with helping the state move forward with what is eventually supposed to be a line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles. While further challenges are inevitable, Szabo said, the project has reached a tipping point where "sustained construction is a reality."

On Capitol Hill, however, it remains an object of scorn for Republicans, who question both the ballooning price tag — now projected at $68 billion — and California’s long-term strategy for paying the bills.

At last April’s hearing of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, Szabo had to rebut a suggestion from then-Chairman Tom Latham (R-Iowa) that the administration had given up on the endeavor. In a news release on the day of the groundbreaking, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) again predicted that the link will never be finished.

"It’s hard to celebrate breaking ground on what is likely to become abandoned pieces of track that never connect to a usable segment," said Denham, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure railroads subcommittee.

Szabo has also clashed with the Association of American Railroads, the freight rail industry’s main trade group, over issues like the minimum crew size needed for freight trains (Greenwire, Dec. 23, 2014).

The association has challenged Amtrak’s authority to set the performance standards in a lawsuit now awaiting a Supreme Court decision (Greenwire, Dec. 8, 2014).

Asked for comment on Szabo’s tenure, the association’s president and CEO, Edward Hamberger, issued a statement wishing him well and thanking him "for his service and his shared dedication to safely bringing home each rail employee after his or her shift."

The railroad administration nonetheless continues to face criticism that it’s not aggressive enough in promoting safety, particularly as crude-by-rail traffic skyrockets.

While Szabo touts across-the-board improvements in every safety area tracked by FRA, the agency is a "pitiful" regulator, said Fred Millar, a rail safety consultant who says more must be done to reroute trains carrying crude and other hazardous materials away from major urban centers.

Following the release of a scathing National Transportation Safety Board report in October on lapses at a New York City-area commuter railroad, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the findings an indictment of FRA oversight. "We must assume that safety and reliability standards receive real enforcement, not just lip service," Blumenthal said in a news release.

"We accept as part of our daily challenge to ourselves that you always have to do better," Szabo responded. But, he added, "our record of success is impressive and it speaks for itself."

Szabo’s departure came with the Supreme Court decision pending. The rail industry is expected to miss this December’s deadline for positive train control implementation. In Congress, the reauthorization process for the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act has already begun.

Asked how FRA, whose 840-strong workforce is little changed from six years ago, despite the added workload, can do its job without permanent leadership, Szabo said he had the "highest level of confidence" in the agency’s permanent staff.

One of the biggest take-aways from his tenure, Szabo said, is the "level of intellect, dedication, the work ethic of the career professionals here, and so I am not concerned."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last Friday quietly approved an 8-mile access road for a drilling project that would be the first to produce oil from the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A).

The Army Corps’ record of decision allows ConocoPhillips Co. to continue pursuing its Greater Mooses Tooth project, known as GMT1, to drill up to 33 development and injection wells at an 11.8-acre drilling pad in the northeastern corner of the 22.5-million-acre NPR-A. The Bureau of Land Management still must give final approval for the project.

The Clean Water Act permit "incorporates all practicable avoidance and minimization measures" and allows up to 73 acres of waters and wetlands to be filled, the corps said.

"The authorization includes special conditions to further avoid and minimize potential adverse impacts and to compensate for unavoidable adverse impacts to the aquatic ecosystem," the corps said.

The approval follows BLM’s decision last October to issue a final environmental impact statement (EIS) on the project offering tentative final approval of the project.

BLM’s EIS selected alternative B, which would reduce the project’s impact on subsistence hunting and fishing in areas used by the nearby Native village of Nuiqsut. Environmental groups are skeptical of the need for a permanent road and have urged BLM to strongly consider roadless and seasonal drilling options. But if a permanent road is to be approved, environmentalists favor alternative B, arguing it better protects Fish Creek.

But the corps permits would authorize Conoco’s preferred route, which was analyzed by BLM as alternative A. The corps said that alternative is the "least environmentally damaging practicable alternative."

That alternative is also preferred by Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (R) and the North Slope Borough, the county-level government representing the North Slope.

BLM said the corps’ permit decision will inform what alternative it ultimately selects in its own record of decision. A BLM spokesman said there was no immediate timeline for a final decision.

Conservationists have long opposed plans for the gravel road, arguing that it could lead to development of an ecologically damaging network of roads and encourage future exploration deeper into the petroleum reserve. BLM’s review of the Conoco project is seen as a bellwether for future projects as industry moves westward into the mostly untapped reserve.

"We have not had a chance to review this decision and the reasons behind it, but we are disappointed that the Army Corps of Engineers has chosen to encroach on Fish Creek, an important watershed and subsistence resource for local communities," said Nicole Whittington-Evans, who directs the Wilderness Society’s Alaska office.

In a Jan. 9 letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, the heads of five major environmental groups said BLM must retain a protective buffer for Fish Creek, calling it an important tributary to special protected areas within the reserve.

"The Fish Creek area would be needlessly damaged under Alternative A by the construction of multiple bridges and other infrastructure," said the CEOs of the Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club and Conservation Lands Foundation. BLM must protect the creek to "uphold the integrity" of its 2013 integrated activity plan for the reserve, they argued.

BLM’s record of decision could include additional environmental mitigation measures, including proposals for legacy well remediation, aircraft and traffic limits to minimize impacts on caribou and an agreement giving local Native communities access to the road.

If ConocoPhillips receives the necessary permits and decides to move forward with the GMT1 project, construction could begin during the last quarter of 2015, with first production likely two years later.

The project could add 30,000 barrels of oil per day to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System by late 2017.

KENEDY, Texas — David Stobaugh parked his Chevy Tahoe along County Road 171 with the nose pointed east, toward the main highway, and waited with the headlights switched off and the engine running.

It was an hour before dawn, and the only illumination came from a drilling rig just off the road. A few hundred yards away, a flare at an oil collection facility flashed and ebbed.

Stobaugh, a Karnes County sheriff’s deputy since last February, already knew the road well. County Road 171, on the western edge of the county, is a two-lane track that’s only partially paved; there’s a strip of blacktop down the center, a few feet of gravel on either side. The speed limit is 30 mph. A few weeks ago, Stobaugh clocked a driver doing 74 mph.

Within minutes, headlights from an approaching pickup appeared in the distance, disappeared behind a hill and reappeared as the truck reached the crest. Stobaugh’s radar gun displayed the truck’s speed in red numbers: 59 mph. Then 60.

As the truck came abreast of the Tahoe, Stobaugh hit his flashing lights, put the Tahoe in gear and swung in a U-turn behind the pickup. By the time the sun came up, he had ticketed four vehicles in the same stretch of road, including an 18-wheeler hauling a tanker-trailer, all for speeding, and all of them driving at least 15 mph above the limit.

"It was going to be a warning, but he’s just going to keep doing it," Stobaugh said after processing a ticket on the Tahoe’s built-in printer.

Welcome to law enforcement in one of the most dangerous places in the oil patch.

As Texas’ oil production has reached 40-year highs, traffic deaths have spiked in oil-producing counties, stretching the resources of local police agencies and angering local residents.

Karnes County, an hour southeast of San Antonio, may be the starkest example. It’s in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale field, and it’s the biggest oil-producing county in Texas, according to state statistics. It has a full-time population of about 15,100 people.

In 2009, before the oil boom started, Karnes County had three traffic deaths, none of them involving heavy trucks or commercial vehicles, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. In 2013, the last full year for which statistics are available, 11 people died in wrecks, including six deaths in wrecks with commercial vehicles.

It’s the same story in neighboring DeWitt and Gonzales counties, the third- and fourth-biggest oil-producing counties in the state. DeWitt had a single traffic death in 2009; the number spiked to nine in 2013, including five involving commercial vehicles. Gonzales had five vehicle deaths in 2009, and the number rose to 10 in 2013, including four in commercial vehicle wrecks.

In rural Texas, local sheriffs provide the bulk of law enforcement, with assistance from the Department of Public Safety’s Highway Patrol.

Over the last five years, shifting priorities and budget reductions have cut into the DPS’s historical role in traffic patrol, at the same time the oil boom has pushed up the number of traffic accidents. That has left Karnes County and other oil-producing counties bearing more of the burden for their residents’ safety.

The DPS’s Commercial Vehicle Enforcement unit, which specializes in heavy trucks, wrote 29 percent fewer tickets in fiscal 2014 than it did in fiscal 2010 — 137,529 compared with 194,618 in 2010, according to statistics obtained by EnergyWire under the state Public Information Act. The Commercial Vehicle Enforcement unit’s criminal arrests fell 7 percent during the same years, to 1,238 in fiscal 2014 from 1,337 in fiscal 2010, the statistics show.

The state Legislature cut the DPS’s highway patrol budget by about 11 percent, from $178 million in fiscal year 2010 to $157.8 million in fiscal 2011, according to data from the Legislative Budget Board. The state has increased the budget for highway patrol to $165.1 million in the current fiscal year — still lower than 2010.

The DPS’s spending for commercial vehicle enforcement rose from $26.6 million in fiscal 2010 to $38.3 million in fiscal 2012. But it fell to $34 million in fiscal 2011. This year, the DPS is budgeted to spend $38 million on commercial vehicle enforcement — about $300,000 less than it did three years ago. A spokeswoman said the funding levels fluctuated because of changes in federal funding.

At the same time, the DPS has had to pull troopers away from routine patrols in other parts of the state to focus on security at the Mexican border, which has been a top priority for outgoing Gov. Rick Perry (R), DPS Director Steve McCraw testified at a legislative hearing in September.

The DPS turned down repeated requests for interviews. In an emailed statement, spokeswoman Summer Blackwell said the statistics may not paint a clear picture of the DPS’s efforts.

"Focusing only on citation numbers does not provide a comprehensive picture of commercial vehicle enforcement in the state of Texas," she said. "Commercial vehicle enforcement activities in the energy sector areas of the state have been a major focus for DPS because the department is aware of the challenges in these areas and is making every effort to respond accordingly."

For instance, the number of commercial vehicle inspections — which can be done by civilians as well as sworn troopers — rose 16 percent in four years, from 345,385 in calendar year 2010 to 401,487 in 2013. Preliminary figures show that the number of inspections fell in 2014 to 352,514. The department is also conducting more audits and compliance reviews of truck operators.

The DPS also does regular "sweeps" of the Eagle Ford, Permian Basin and other oil-producing areas to check for commercial vehicle violations, Blackwell wrote.

State highway spending also took a hit. Funding for highway construction fell from $5.2 billion in 2008 to $4.2 billion in 2012, according to the Texas Department of Transportation (EnergyWire, Aug. 27, 2014).

The lack of spending has left roads throughout the oil patch in bad condition, further eroding safety.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies have drilled at a furious pace. Karnes, DeWitt and Gonzales counties are in the middle of the Eagle Ford Shale, a huge oil and gas field that has only seen development in the last five years.

In 2009, the state issued 94 drilling permits in the Eagle Ford Shale, which includes Karnes, DeWitt and Gonzales, and parts of more than 20 other counties. In 2013, the number increased to 4,416. In the first 11 months of 2014, it issued 5,254. Each well can require more than 1,100 truck trips to haul in equipment, sand and water and to haul away oil and wastewater.

State officials say more resources are on the way.

Voters approved a ballot proposal in November to divert some of the state’s taxes on oil and gas production to road construction. At least 15 percent of the money — estimated at $261 million during the current fiscal year — will be spent on roads in oil-producing counties, Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Nick Wade said in an email.

The Transportation Department adopted an emergency rule in October that allowed it to lower the speed limits on some rural, two-lane state roads in response to the high crash rates. The department is seeking a permanent rule change that will allow it to adjust speed limits in weeks rather than months.

The DPS has obtained federal funds to pay travel costs and overtime for its troopers to conduct sweeps in the oil-producing regions, spokesman Tom Vinger said in an email. It has also asked for additional funding in the next budget cycle to hire more troopers.

The trucking industry is trying to improve its record, too, said Scott Smith, safety director at Lake Truck Lines in San Antonio. The company specializes in hauling cement and other ingredients to drill sites and is one of the fast-growing shippers in the oil patch.

Lake uses GPS monitors to track the speed of its trucks, and its managers get automatic alerts if a truck is speeding or has to make a quick stop, Smith said.

Still, hauling materials in the oil patch is inherently more difficult — and dangerous — than open-road driving. Lake’s drivers work all hours of the day and night and have to traverse unpaved lease roads with heavy loads.

It’s constant work to make sure that trucks are maintained and drivers don’t work too many hours, Smith said.

"These guys aren’t machines; they’ve got to rest sometime," he said.

Public anger about the danger of oil field traffic is palpable. On Dec. 5, an oil company pickup clipped the back of a Karnes City school bus as it was unloading students on a rural road. No one was injured.

"How can you not see that there’s a school bus right in front of you?" Jeanette Winn, superintendent of the Karnes City Independent School District, said in an interview.

Tracey Honig, a mother of two who lives northeast of Karnes City, got so tired of seeing trucks fly past her daughters’ school bus every morning that she started posting videos of the trucks on Facebook. One clip from October got 73,000 views.

"Last year was really bad — we had one or two trucks a month run the bus stop," Honig said in an interview.

Traffic safety is just one of the worries that Karnes County Sheriff Dwayne Villanueva inherited when he took over the office in 2012.

The oil boom has brought jobs and prosperity, but the influx of oil field workers has brought a predictable increase in bar fights and other disturbances, and the county has seen an influx of synthetic marijuana, Villanueva said.

Most of Karnes County’s firefighters are volunteers, and the county is now home to several industrial plants that process oil and gas, along with thousands of wells and hundreds of miles of pipeline.

Karnes County doubled the size of the sheriff’s department to about 30 deputies in 2014, and the county is building a new 50-bed jail. Traffic lights have popped up in small towns. The sheriff and the local school district have experimented with cameras on school buses to monitor for unsafe driving.

One reason Villanueva created a six-deputy traffic unit was to free the rest of his deputies to focus on other calls.

One deputy is certified to inspect trucks for some safety violations, such as heavy loads. The DPS, though, is in charge of other aspects of commercial vehicle enforcement, like inspecting trucks’ brakes and monitoring drivers’ working hours.

Villanueva said he’s still grateful for the DPS’s assistance. The state agency has made up for the cuts in routine patrols by conducting regular sweeps of commercial vehicles, enforcing the laws that the sheriff’s deputies can’t.

The oil companies also help out by providing firefighting equipment and other necessities. Villanueva said he and other local law officers have spoken about traffic issues at oil companies’ safety meetings.

Villanueva said he has enough deputies these days to handle the load, but the county will need to maintain the level as long as the drilling lasts.

"The meetings we go to, they tell us 15 to 25 years is how long it’ll be here," he said.

Back on patrol after a court appearance, Stobaugh said he was surprised to make it through a shift without having to investigate an accident.

Shortly after his lunch break, an 18-wheeler clipped a guardrail on a highway bridge between Kenedy and Karnes City. Stobaugh, cruising the highway a few miles away, turned on his siren and gunned the Tahoe as he responded, then slowed back down when other deputies radioed that it was a minor incident.

After a year on the traffic beat, he said the focus on speeding is helping.

"If you’ve got a heavy presence in problem areas, they’ll slow down," he said.

Were it not for two large universities and a steady flow of traffic on U.S. 11, Potsdam, N.Y., might be just another Norman Rockwell-inspired village along the the U.S.-Canada border between Lake Ontario and Montreal.

But Potsdam (population 17,029) claims in abundance what only a few other upstate towns have — bad weather, brainpower and a unique set of conditions for engineers trying to build the nation’s first fully functional municipal microgrid for the village of Potsdam.

With an expected completion in 2017, Potsdam’s underground microgrid should be capable of delivering electricity to all of the village’s essential services using local generation assets that can be isolated from the regional transmission grid and "islanded" to roughly a dozen sites, including local police, fire, hospital and emergency response facilities, and the campuses of Clarkson University and the State University of New York, Potsdam.

If successful, the microgrid, which was first conceived as a research project in Clarkson’s electrical engineering program, could become a model for municipalities across the country where power infrastructure is vulnerable to disruptions both natural and man-made, including major weather events and cyberattacks.

Thomas Ortmeyer, a professor and director of the power engineering program at Clarkson and principal investigator on the Potsdam microgrid, said the idea was originally conceived to cover only the university campus, but he and his colleagues were persuaded "to think bigger, to a resilient microgrid that would serve critical loads throughout our community."

Other key collaborators on the project include National Grid, upstate New York and New England’s largest electricity provider, and General Electric Co., whose GE Global Research Division is backing the effort with $1.5 million in federal grand funding as well as $300,000 in private dollars.

GE’s main charge is to develop an enhanced microgrid control system (eMCS) that will "be the key element in keeping the town’s electricity system up and running for several days should it become disconnected from the main power station," according to GE scientists involved in the project.

Sumit Bose, GE’s principal investigator on the project and a microgrid technology leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., said Potsdam provides an ideal mix of energy resources, technology know-how and grid connectivity to support a resilient municipal microgrid that can withstand a variety of load conditions and disruptions.

To date, only one other U.S. microgrid bears similarity to what is planned at Potsdam, according to Bose. It was built by GE in partnership with the Defense Department at the Marine Corps’ Twentynine Palms Combat Center in California’s Mojave Desert. That microgrid is designed to improve energy efficiency at the base and maintain power in the event that the 932-square-mile facility is cut off from the Southern California grid.

Other microgrids have been built on university campuses, including several in New York, and at hospitals and government-owned sites like the Food and Drug Administration’s White Oak campus in Silver Spring, Md.

But to date, there has been little in the way of scaling microgrids to the municipal level, although state funding for such projects has begun flowing in places like New York, where the New York Energy Research and Development Authority has allocated $3.3. million to improve the resilience of the state’s electricity grid.

"We had what we thought was a great idea, and DOE agreed to fund it," Bose said, "We went looking for a place to test it, and the stars kind of aligned" with Potsdam, only three hours away from Niskayuna by car.

Indeed, weather-related power outages are common in Potsdam, where arctic blasts, lake effect snows and ice storms can leave residents, students, businesses and farmers in surrounding St. Lawrence County powerless, immobile and vulnerable to deadly conditions, including as recently as December 2013, when an inch of ice coated the region and knocked out power to thousands of homes and businesses.

In an interview, Everett Basford, Potsdam’s village administrator, recalled the now infamous January 1998 storm that deposited up to 3 inches of ice across the region, its heavy weight snapping trees and power lines while sending emergency vehicles and utility trucks skidding into ditches.

"Luckily, it happened while all of our students were away on break, so that helped in terms of our emergency response," Basford said. "But the ice was so thick and so widespread that we couldn’t get essential supplies trucked in here for days."

The ice event was followed days later by up to 5 inches of rain, creating a massive flood on top of a winter weather emergency.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ranked the ice and flooding as among the deadliest and costliest weather events in the region’s history, with 40 fatalities and more than $3 billion in damage to property and infrastructure in New York, New England and Canada.

It would remain the storm of record for many New Yorkers until October 2012, when Superstorm Sandy made landfall on the New York and New Jersey coasts, destroying much of the densely populated coastal zone and turning the Northeast’s power grid into a heap of smoldering wires.

While communities like Potsdam were awakening to their increased vulnerability from weather-related power outages, so, too, were the region’s power utilities and telecommunications companies, many of which experienced disruptions both before and after Sandy, but especially during the 2012 superstorm, which laid waste to much of the Jersey Shore and pounded Manhattan and more inland areas with heavy wind, rain and floodwaters.

Virginia Limmiatis, a National Grid spokeswoman, said her company’s interest in developing community-scale microgrids stemmed directly from events like Sandy and the ice storms in its upstate New York service area, including the more recent December 2013 storm that coated Watertown, N.Y., and points north and east with an inch-thick sheet of ice.

"This whole project is the brainchild of some really horrific events," Limmiatis said in a telephone interview. "What we’d like to do is give customers who are in these hard-hit areas some assurance that should something like this befall them again, the microgrid could supply essential energy."

While the Potsdam microgrid’s design is still in the early stages and implementation may take several more years, following testing and simulation studies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, GE’s Bose said that the concept is fairly straightforward. Engineers want to harness as much locally derived energy as possible — including from solar panels, hydroelectric dams and thermal resources — and manage that power in such a way that it can be routed to transmission networks during routine day-to-day operations but tapped exclusively for local needs during emergencies.

"We still have to work out how the [distributed generation] resources will work together, and what is the most efficient way to operate them for emergency power and for everyday power," he said. Some local generation assets, like a municipally owned 900-kilowatt hydrodam on the Raquette River, might run most of the time, while others might be dispatched only when the microgrid is online.

Basford, the village administrator, said he’s confident that Potsdam can generate enough electricity through hydro, solar and combined heat-and-power facilities to meet essential demand in emergencies. At the same time, the village has no plans to sever ties with National Grid, which expects to take a lead role in operating the Potsdam microgrid and balancing flows between the microgrid and its larger transmission lines.

"I believe that the utility up here has a very good reliability rating," Basford said. "It’s just that we’re in an area that is sparsely populated, and things are really spread out, with lots of back roads with power lines and mini-substations along them.

"We could have a situation where one of those substations gets knocked out and it might be days before it comes back on. So if you can create a microgrid to take care of those kinds of needs, it’s just a logical path to go."

SMAP lives in a stark white clean room at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will be launched on Jan. 29 into space, where it will unfurl a giant antenna that looks like a circular fence.

The antenna is designed to collect signals pinging up from Earth 426 miles below. To SMAP, also known as the Soil Moisture Active Passive instrument, the Earth looks like a gigantic glass chamber of carbon and water, a setup similar to scientist Joseph Priestly’s experiment in 1771 when he discovered the carbon cycle. Priestly trapped a mouse and a mint plant inside a glass jar and found that the plant inhaled carbon dioxide (CO2) for photosynthesis and exhaled water vapor and oxygen, which the mouse breathed and thrived on. The carbon got used by the plant to make leaves and stems.

Scientists will use SMAP for their version of this experiments, with the planet as their glass jar. At the Arctic circle are stands of spruce, fir and pine form one of the largest contiguous forests on the planet. These boreal forests and other vegetated areas are like the mint plant. They absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and scientists call them net "carbon sinks" because traditionally they take in about 30 percent of the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

But as temperatures rise and the summer season lengthens, the soils in Alaska and the Arctic have been thawing. Forests are getting drier and wildfires now rage more frequently, releasing carbon, so scientists do not know how much longer these forests will remain carbon sinks. Measurements are key, and this is SMAP’s task. Once it is in space, it will provide the most frequent and highest-resolution measurements of exactly how frozen the ground is in the northern latitudes.

"The problem is the nature and stability of the land carbon sink; it is largely unknown," said John Kimball, a professor of hydrology at the Flathead Lake Biological Station at the University of Montana and a SMAP science team member.

The satellite will also help with weather forecasting and climate modeling, which require accurate soil moisture measurements. This Swiss-army-knife quality of SMAP has made the mission highly attractive to Congress, which had funded the satellite through three presidential terms.

The spacecraft, an assemblage of refined steel and foil, has cost $915 million to put together and taken more than two decades of effort. Some scientists have begun and ended their careers in the satellite’s shadows, helping develop multiple Earth-observing radars along the way.

In the early 1980s, at fields in Beltsville, Md., Ted Engman, then an engineer with the Department of Agriculture and later chief of the hydrologic branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his colleagues experimented with microwaves of the kind that pops corn kernels. They shot pulses of the microwaves at soil. The slight shift in reflected energy told them how moist the soil was.

Soil moisture is the spoke of our planet’s water cycle. Rainfall enters the soil, which plants drink from. And as they add carbonaceous material, plants barter water vapor for CO2, much like Priestley’s mint. The exhaled water vapor forms clouds and triggers rainfall, which re-enters the soil. The entire transaction is similar to withdrawing from and depositing cash into a checking account, explained Dara Entekhabi, science team leader for SMAP and a professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Soil moisture is the bank account of water in the land," he said.

Knowing soil moisture reveals quite a lot, as well, about the carbon cycle, through which carbon enters air, gets trapped in growing foliage, dissolves in oceans, is incorporated into calcite rock cliffs and gets breathed out by living beings. It also links to the flow of energy through the planet as water evaporates and condenses, forming ice, clouds, vapor and liquid.

These processes occur at the poles, but in sub-zero temperatures, soil does not have water so much as it has ice. Out of the frozen ground rise the forests of the taiga, which have served as carbon traps for the past 11,500 years. These forests act as sinks when the ground thaws during spring and water becomes available to plants, which then grab CO2 from the atmosphere and start growing.

SMAP will track the thawing and refreezing of the Earth, split into 1.9-square-mile grids, which will help scientists understand the carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere. The measurement is key, since more than half the planet’s vegetated land area — 25 million square miles, four times the size of Russia — freezes in the wintertime and halts photosynthesis.

As the world has been warming, this freeze-thaw cycle appears to be changing. Scientists have noted that spring is advancing by about a day and a half every decade in the northern latitudes, but they lack a good instrument to track this advance throughout the world, said Kimball of the Flathead Lake Biological Station.

"Effectively, 25 percent to 30 percent each year of the CO2 that is emitted to the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning is taken out of the atmosphere by land processes that we don’t fully understand," he said. "And if we don’t fully understand the processes, then we don’t really know the potential vulnerability to [climate] change."

Engman and his colleagues did not know all this in the 1980s, when engineers first began measuring the planet from space. Beginning in the ’60s, the early LANDSAT satellites had taken photos of the Negev Desert, which straddles Egypt and Israel. The photographs showed how land that was overgrazed on the Egyptian side appeared a shade lighter than moister and more fertile lands on the Israeli side.

Scientists then reasoned that if such minute differences in land cover could be seen from space, they could probably be measured. "We had some friends that we’d get together now and then, and we’d began to feel the potential for remote sensing was pretty big. And so we started pursuing some of that," Engman recalled.

Armed with tools and designs, Engman and his colleagues began working on microwave-emitting radars. In the ’90s, they used planes to fly their devices over fields in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. They soon wanted more than that.

"The ability to get something up in space and be able to continually measure over the globe is very intriguing," Engman said. "Oh, we dreamed of it."

The dreams led to instrument packages on the Space Shuttle that recorded, among other things, rainfall, temperature and soil moisture. As the shuttle passed over a particular field in Oklahoma, Engman and his team would fly an aircraft equipped with the radar along the shuttle’s path. At the same time, graduate students would dig into the soil to record soil moisture. The synchronous measurements were to ground the truth of the shuttle’s radar.

It was clear by then that the device could be helpful to learn about climate change. Atmospheric scientists had built computer models that split the planet into a grid, with each cell containing an algorithmic representation of the wind, ocean, temperatures and other processes of the planet. Soil moisture was an important building block in these models, but scientists had very few of these measurements from most parts of the world.

"Only over industrialized nations like Western Europe, North America and parts of Asia do we have measurements of this, and even there, it is very sparse," Entekhabi of MIT said.

Climate models have evolved since the 1990s, but they still get key rainfall processes wrong, partly because of incomplete soil moisture measurements, said Chris Taylor, a researcher at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire, England.

In climate models, rainfall occurs as a drizzle, usually around midday. In the real world, rain falls mostly in the late afternoon. Imagine, then, how challenging it must be for scientists to simulate precipitation 50 or 100 years from today in East Africa or India or over a boreal forest in Canada, affected as these regions are by swirls of very disparate atmospheric phenomena.

Soil moisture measurements, especially at the level of detail SMAP will provide, would help scientists with the challenge, Taylor said. Take a drought, for instance. Scientists need to understand how a soil dries out during times of water stress in order to accurately represent the physics of the process in a climate model. Without such measurements, "you can end up locking in a mistake," Taylor said.

"Then you are running this model forward, and the soil gets drier, and that is translated into reduced rainfall, and then you lock in a drought," he said.

The United States’ National Research Council espoused the importance of soil moisture measurements in a 1999 report in which it advised NASA to get the device into space.

It was the golden age for Earth observations. NASA launched two satellites: Terra in 1999 and Aqua in 2004. The missions were ambitious on a scale not seen before or since.

"We just didn’t have the computational ability to be able to handle that much data before 2000," said Kimball of the University of Montana.

With the costs of handling enormous data loads falling, projects like SMAP became feasible. NASA began planning for a soil moisture satellite almost immediately, but budgetary constraints shelved the first attempt in 2005.

Deliverance came in 2008, when President George W. Bush’s budget funded NASA for the soil moisture mission. The device was named SMAP and was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It will launch on a Delta II rocket in nine days.

Once in orbit, the satellite will fly between the poles and measure soil across the world every two to three days. Using the data, NASA would construct two maps for scientists to use: a soil moisture map with a resolution of 6.2 miles and a freeze-thaw map with a resolution of 1.9 miles. The satellite penetrates to a depth of 2 inches.

These qualities will make SMAP the best and most comprehensive tracker of the world’s soil. Its life span is officially three years, but it may function for much longer in the cool, benign environment of space, Engman said.

"So if they get it [SMAP] good in the first place, chances are it can run for quite a long time," Engman said.

In his first State of the Union address to two Republican-controlled chambers of Congress, expect President Obama to come out swinging tonight on energy and the environment.

The president has grown increasingly confrontational toward the legislative branch in recent years during his annual speeches. And as newly empowered congressional Republicans have put Obama’s energy agenda in their cross hairs — and now that Obama isn’t facing re-election or looming midterms — the president is likely to double down on his go-it-alone strategy when it comes to climate and environmental issues.

"I would suspect it’s going to be fairly combative," said Eric Washburn, a former Senate Democratic leadership aide who’s now an energy industry lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani. "I would imagine him pursuing a bit of a populist contrast with Congress."

Obama said Saturday that he’ll "call on this new Congress to join me in putting aside the political games and finding areas where we agree so we can deliver for the American people."

But as he lays out his energy and climate priorities, he’s unlikely to find much common ground with Republican lawmakers.

The president is likely to tout the recent climate deal between the United States and China, ongoing work to tackle climate change through U.S. EPA regulations and other big-ticket environmental rules his administration is looking to wrap up before he leaves office. His pitch for broad tax reforms could also include reiterating his call to end tax breaks to oil companies.

That’s all likely to ruffle feathers among the GOP and Obama’s critics in industry, many of whom have urged the president to strike a conciliatory tone in his speech tonight.

Voters in November "called for President Obama to cooperate with Congress," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a speech Friday. "On that front, we’ve got some distance to cover. … But Tuesday can be a new day. This can be the moment the president pivots to a positive posture."

Obama’s critics among business trade groups aren’t expecting to like what they hear on the energy front tonight.

"I think that the president has started to make it clear that he has a vision for the country, and he is going to use every tool within the executive branch — and, frankly, some that don’t exist legally — to implement that vision," said Christopher Guith, senior vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

As usual, Obama is likely to speak in broad terms during his speech, rather than drilling down into policy details. The specific issues that energy stakeholders will be listening for include climate rules to curb methane and power plant emissions, energy exports, water regulations, and nuclear energy strategy.

Obama could mention the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, although several observers said they’re expecting him to steer clear of the hot-button issue. The GOP-led Congress has made forcing Obama’s hand on the pipeline a top priority this year, but the White House has pledged to veto legislation that would override the administration.

Some environmentalists are hopeful that Obama will nix the phrase "all of the above" when it comes to discussing his energy priorities. Ahead of his annual address last year, a coalition of green groups asked Obama to jettison the phrase — typically used to show support for fossil and renewable fuels — from his vocabulary. The president stuck with it, saying in 2014, "the all-of-the-above energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working" (E&E Daily, Jan. 29, 2014).

"I hope he won’t do that again," said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign and former longtime director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program.

The White House signaled that climate science will be a key theme with the announcement yesterday that Nicole Hernandez Hammer, a sea-level rise expert in southeast Florida, will be among the guests hosted by first lady Michelle Obama (Greenwire, Jan. 19).

Becker is hopeful Obama will strike a forceful tone on climate change, particularly with the speech coming on the heels of government scientists’ reports that 2014 was Earth’s warmest year on record.

Given the state of the science, Becker said, he’d like Obama to explain that "we need to take very strong action to cut pollution." With the GOP in charge of both chambers of Congress, he added, Obama "really needs to talk to the American people."